Forensic crime fiction
- Book: The Mirror Man
- Location: Sweden
- Author: Lars Kepler
Young Jenny Lind goes missing. Another girl, Alice, dies in a tragic accident. Police officer Joona Linna of the National Crime Squad is assigned to investigate Jenny’s case. He is unpopular with his new boss, and she soon removes him from the case, but he pursues it anyway. Joona establishes that Alice’s father is the only witness to what happened to Jenny, but fear prevents him from remembering what he saw. Will he remember in time to save others?
Lovers of the Swedish Joona Linna series by Lars Kepler* are in for a treat with The Mirror Man. For me, it was a first excursion into Joona’s world, and certainly a memorable one! This book is not for the squeamish. It describes in great detail almost every crime against the person, narrowly avoiding tipping over into being gratuitous in the cruelty it depicts. Many of the incidents are crimes against women – the story is about the abduction and incarceration of female victims. The unfortunate Joona suffers several physical injuries in the course of the book, any one of which that would fell most men and put them out of action.
On their website, the authors say: “These stories are a way for us to manage our own fears of people’s cruelty. Writing about Joona Linna and Saga Bauer represents a journey from chaos to order, questions to answers, injustice to justice.”
*Lars Kepler is the pen name of a married Swedish couple and this is the eighth book in the series. You don’t need to have read the earlier books in order to follow what’s going on in The Mirror Man, though one disadvantage of being new to the books is the sheer number of characters, some of whom would be familiar to fans.
The Mirror Man’s plot is gripping; the tension is quickly racked up and I enjoyed the sleight of hand trickery that leads the reader down blind alleys. Armchair sleuth readers are almost certainly going to identify the wrong perpetrator before the end of the book. I know I did! The use of the present tense throughout will irritate some, but it keeps the narrative romping along. The fast pace doesn’t sacrifice attention to detail, from gory crime scenes to the more picturesque parts of Sweden. The authors provide comprehensive information about mental health and investigative science, which is satisfying for those readers who enjoy forensic crime fiction. There’s a particularly apt instance of Stockholm syndrome, which amused me when I thought of it. But enough spoilers – try it yourself and see what you think.
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