Midwinter Blood

by Mons Kallentoft

Overview

WHEN THE ICE MELTS, WHAT REMAINS?

Thirty-four years old, blond, single, divorced with a teenage daughter, Fors is the most driven superintendent who has ever worked on the police force in her small, isolated town. And the most talented. In her job, she is constantly moving through the borderland between life and death. Her path in life is violent and hazardous.

Linköping, Sweden, is surrounded by a landscape of plains and forests—a fault line on the edges of society where time seems to have stood still and where some people live entirely according to their own rules. In the early hours of a frigid night, during the coldest February anyone can remember, the bloody body of an obese man, stripped bare and horribly mutilated, is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of a frozen, snow-covered, and windswept plain not far from town.

The young superintendent Malin Fors is assigned to the case. Together with her colleagues from the Investigation Section of Linköping’s Crime Unit, she must track down the identity of the man in the tree and the reason why he ended up there. And at the same time they must follow in the frigid wake of a killer who has just begun his work. It is a manhunt that will take Malin into the darkest corners of the human heart where the sins of the past— hidden away—all too often wreak havoc from one generation to the next.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451642537
Publisher:	Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Series:	Malin Fors Thrillers , #1
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	193,101
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

After being awarded one of Sweden’s highest literary awards for his debut novel Pesetas, Mons Kallentoft chose to give his own unique take on the classic Scandinavian crime novel. His success was immediate. The first book in the series about superintendent Malin Fors received unanimous praise from the national critics; it also conquered the bestseller charts and has today sold more than 300,000 copies in Sweden alone.

Editorial Reviews

The discovery could hardly have been more gruesome: An obese, naked, mutilated body hanging from a tree, its bloody torso frozen in the frigid winter air. Assigned to this grisly homicide is superintendent Malin Fors, a 34-year-old divorcee who approaches every case with an intensity that even other investigators can understand. Midwinter Blood is the latest mystery by bestselling, award-winning Swedish novelist Mons Kallentoft. Editor's recommendation.

First published in Sweden in 2007, Kallentoft’s psychologically astute, carefully crafted first novel featuring Linköping police inspector Malin Fors, a 33-year-old divorced mother, centers on the death of 330-pound Bengt Andersson, an eccentric loner found beaten, cut, and hanging naked from a solitary oak in the frozen countryside. As part of the investigation, Fors and her partner, Zeke Martinsson, look into Andersson’s disjointed family history, the teenage boys who tormented him, and the ritualistic nature of the murder that a local history professor likens to a “midwinter blood” sacrifice of Viking vintage. The case develops with painstaking slowness, allowing for a detailed, nuanced portrait of the relationship of Fors with her 13-year-old daughter as well as with her fellow officers. Meanwhile, the murder victim’s spirit floats around, offering its wry observations on the proceedings. Readers will look forward to the next three volumes in the series, already scheduled to appear in successive years. Agent: Joakim Hansson, Nordin Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Kallentoft's first English-language translation pits Detective Inspector Malin Fors against a killer who committed an unspeakably ritualistic murder. In the middle of what feels like Linköping's coldest winter in years, Malin Fors is called to a horrific crime scene. Someone has bashed Bengt Andersson to death, stabbed him several times for good measure, stripped him naked and hung him from a high branch of an oak tree. Since his blood is already frozen and there's no hurry to examine the forensic evidence, Malin orders the body left in place for the time being. Bad mistake: Bengt crashes into the tent pitched beneath him, breaking a police officer's arm in the process. It's the first of many missteps Malin will make in trying to figure out who might have killed the eccentric loner and why. Rickard Skoglöf and his girlfriend, Valkyria Karlsson, who advocate sacrificing animals each midwinter and hanging them from trees, sniff that they wouldn't sanction anything so depraved. And the family of Maria Murvall, whose rape years ago sent her deep into psychosis, simply closes ranks against the authorities they insist are harassing them. Malin seems to be doing little better on the home front. Tove, the 13-year-old daughter she's raising alone, has found a boyfriend and discovered sex, to the disapproval of Malin's father and the consternation of Malin, who became a teen bride when she found herself pregnant with Tove. No wonder then, that on meeting the speechless, unresponsive Maria, Malin thinks: "You're a lot like me." A complex, heartfelt, rather grueling procedural, middling for the current bumper crop of Scandinavian imports, and first of a series of four seasonal cases for Malin.

Kirkus Reviews