Fatal Gambit

Starred review from July 22, 2024
In Lagercrantz’s excellent second investigation for Stockholm police officer Micaela Vargas and professor Hans Rekke (after Dark Music), the pair reopens a cold case when a holiday snapshot suggests a long-missing banker may be alive and well in Venice. Financier Claire Lidman was last seen in 1999 and reported dead 14 years later—but her husband, Samuel, brings Vargas a photograph that he swears contains the supposedly dead woman in the background. Vargas loops in forensics expert Rekke, and the more they investigate, the more they start to believe Samuel. Soon, they uncover Claire’s connections to a vast conspiracy involving high-ranking Swedish government officials, international finance, and organized crime in the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Vargas and Rekke face their own dramas: Rekke’s daughter gets a new boyfriend who causes friction between the friends, and an old enemy emerges from the professor’s past. Part of the fun is Lagercrantz’s deliberate use of Holmesian tropes—there’s a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind, and Vargas and Rekke echo Holmes and Watson in more ways than one—but he departs from Conan Doyle’s template with a complex, borderline-baroque mystery plot, to thrilling effect. By the end of the pulse-pounding denouement, readers will be breathless for the next installment. Agent: Jessica Bab, Brave New World.

October 1, 2024
A distinctive Swedish duo returns (Dark Music, 2022) in this missing person yarn. Almost 14 years ago, Claire Lidman left her home and husband with neither notice nor note. She apparently perished in a fiery crash; her charred corpse was identified through dental records. Nearly everyone believes that she is dead, but her husband clings to hope. A recent photo--a holiday snap taken by a neighbor--surfaces with what looks like Claire's face in the background. Enter professor Hans Rekke and police constable Micaela Vargas to investigate. "I may be a detective of sorts," Rekke says, "but I am not a policeman or a lawyer." He sees himself as "a pianist and Professor of Psychology, a fragile intellectual" who sprinkles his sentences with Latin phrases. But he underrates himself. For one thing, he has powers of deduction rivaling those of Sherlock Holmes: he hears footsteps coming from an elevator and he knows it's Micaela, "with her punctuated eighth tempo," and he concludes she's with his brother, Magnus. Claire once had business ties with Gabor Morovia, whom Rekke has known since his youth and who now is a powerful, vengeful "lapsed mathematician and womaniser," not to mention a rotter who also likes to torture and burn cats. Readers will enjoy hating this villain, who would have fit perfectly in a James Bond movie. He's a demon on the chessboard, which plays a key role in the outcome. And readers will like the good guys, who have their own baggage to tote. Rekke is a pill popper who enjoys his "hardly addictive" OxyContin. Down-to-earth Vargas is a good cop who hates crime, especially when it's committed by her career criminal brother. (One of his pals warns, "Stop digging dirt on your brother, you piece of cop shit.") Tension builds to a crescendo in this well-crafted novel with an ending that suggests a third volume to come. Quirky and satisfying.

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