Eriksson is a stylist who seems to find a congenial spot in Nordic Noir. But he gets so involved in his sidebars and secondary characters and situations that the plot slows down, drags, and sometimes disappears. So it is here. Ann Lindell, the main detective, is feeling middle-aged and gets horny frequently without doing much about it. Laura Hindersten is mentally off and also horny. She finds her solution in Stig, a married man and thinks they will live happily in Italy once his divorce from Je...

I am a rather slow reader, rarely is a book a "page turner" for me. An exception to this was Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the Night. I read the book at record speed in two days! Why? First of all I think that the translation must be excellent since the words flow smoothly without the jarring transitions that sometimes characterize translated works. It was poetic mystery writing. Another reason for my enthusiastic reading was that the book "hooked" me. Not so much because of the typical wh...

I couldn’t connect or invest in any of the characters. There was too many being thrown in that I was desperately trying to distinguish and remember who people were. I think this was due to the lack of information around the characters. Physical descriptions were vague if they existed at all, and biographical descriptions were just as vague. I had nothing to anchor the characters to their names and stories. Perhaps this was something that was lost in the translation to English. Something that was...

The current overall score of 3.67 seems just about right to me. The plot was consistently interesting, although I felt the pace dropped a little too often. The team is interesting but I think there a pre tow many of them, making it hard to identify with individuals. The spirit of Wallendar seems to run through the narrative. I have others to read and lol forward to them, without them having forc.ed their way up the pile.

The last 100+ pages of this book were the most engaging in the book. The rest of the book dragged on and the end of the book was rather disappointing and unsatisfying. Hard to keep track of who's who and how they all relate to one another at times.

An effort to create a compelling psychological mystery. The premise is that three seemingly unrelated murders and one disappearance have taken place. The clues are few and far between, so the Uppsala detectives keep revisiting the murder sites in an effort to find more clues. The principle detective and protagonist, Ann Lindell, is herself something of a psychological case, so there are behavioral parallels between her and the murderer, as both display obsessive behaviors. Lindell's obsessive be...

The last fifty pages or so are great. The rest, however, are a little boring. A bit too slow moving for my tastes. The structure is very similar to The Princess of Burundi, and it's really not my cup of tea. I prefer police procedurals that are entirely from the police's point of view. I like the sense of discovery; it's lost in novels like this where you get to know more than the protagonists.

In this, Eriksson’s second book to be translated into English, we once again meet up with Ann Lindell and her team from the Uppsala police department’s Violent Crimes division. This time, the team is called in to investigate the seemingly motiveless deaths of three elderly men, all very quiet, all living alone. The police, in the search for anything which might lead them to a killer, try to fathom why these men were killed and what tied their lives together. Lindell gets the idea that perhaps sh...

I simply could not get into the book. I didn't have any interest in the characters. Maybe something gets lost in translation, but I find the writing style to be very choppy and it was not holding my interest. I've marked it as "read", just to leave a review, but I didn't finish it.

This is the second title in a series that has good potential. Here, unfortunately, there is not one appealing character beyond the main one, Ann Lindell, a young single mother and detective.The main bad person was just unnatural, even for a crazy person. Not calculating enough. Not evil enough. Ann's love interest did not have an ounce of sex appeal beyond being nice looking. Really? Her boss was pretty ineffective. Another couple was cold on one half and simply ridiculous on the other half. All...

Another crime audiobook to fill my holiday but this one was a bit of a dud for me. It was too slow, alternating between the detective chapters and other characters, including the murderer. I quite liked the chapters with Detective Lindell and probably would have enjoyed a standard police procedural book that was more about her and her team. The rest, with the other characters, were either dull or seemed superfluous to the story and felt like filler, especially later in the book when the main eve...

This is an engrossing murder mystery by a Swedish writer featuring Inspector Ann Lindell. The setting is Uppsala. A young woman comes into the police station to report that her father, with whom she lived, has gone missing. Within a few days, two local farmers are found bludgeoned to death.The father has apparently disappeared for good, but is there any connection between his disappearance and the murders of the two farmers? It seems strange, but with her team of investigators, some apparently u...

The psychology of the deranged killer and the psychology of the individual cops who together must make sense of the murders alternate throughout this mystery. The dreams, fantasies and obsessions of the killer contrast with the mundane, everyday work-life and relationship issues that preoccupy the police trying to solve the crime, but also live their own lives. Ann Lindell and her colleagues are not Sherlock Holmes."the place suggested peacefulness, but loneliness even more, especially like this...

The structure of this book was not for me. Equal time was given to the solving of the murders and the painfully boring why of the murders. I did enjoy the Eriksson characters. Both main and minor. Their personalities were revealed through conversation and reaction to other characters. Almost like a play unfolding. Quite lean writing here and I was happy to discover this aspect of the book.His two main women characters though...I cannot decide if the author wrote them flawed or if he actually thi...

Was my first book by this author and introduction to the main protagonist. I found her interesting and liked the personal and professional look at her life. Although I though her reaction to the ‘new man’ a bit unusual.As to the main story I though the portrayal of the troubled Laura realistic and as tormented as she is. I felt like shouting at ‘Stig’ to run away even before we find out her history.Enjoyable intro to the author.

This is the second book I have read of Eriksson's....first was The Princess of Burundi...and like that one, I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery which involves the police in Uppsala, Sweden with Inspector Ann Lindell being the main character. I like the way we are getting to know more personal information about Lindell and her co-workers and look forward to getting the next book from the library today "Stone Coffin". The murderer was the person I thought it would be but it was a maze to wander thro...

I'm always hesitant to criticize the translation of a book from another language into English. After all, English is not an easy language, and I think it must be very difficult to convey the meaning of another language into English in a smooth, easy-flowing manner. That being the case, I still must say that I found this particular translation by Ebba Segerberg of Kjell Eriksson's The Cruel Stars of the the Night from Swedish into English to be particularly clunky and stilted. It is likely that i...

3.5. This nicely lasted for exactly one whole return rail journey, perfect. It is clear fairly early on (to the reader) who the murderer is, but the reader is privy to a great deal which the police do not know, so the POV is not the usual one. We do not know why or how and we have to work out the motive, which is far from clear. There is a great deal of wanton destruction in this story (if you're a lover of old books, be warned - there is an upsetting scene!) Also much broken glass and damage to...

Brilliant exploration of a disturbed mind.