Friday, September 27, 2019

Death Angels by Åke Edwardson

(pb; 1997: first book in the Chief Inspector Erik Winter series)

From the back cover

“Meet Erik Winter: a bachelor gourmand with a palate for obscure jazz and Lagavulin─and Sweden’s youngest Chief Inspector. Despite his new promotin, it’s been a tough year─on the heels of losing a childhood friend to AIDS, he now must contend with the parallel murders of young British and Swedish tourists in Gothenburg and South London. Winter and his British counterpart, Steve Macdonald, find clues leading straight into the dark heart of the black-market entertainment trade. But when they hit a dead end, Winter plays a hunch that the bloody fottprints at the crime scenes suggest a macabre performance─a taint intended for Winter himself.”


Review

Death is a mostly lean, entertaining police procedural with a quirky lead character and a semi-philosophical, nostalgic bent─Edwardson allows his characters occasional, brief indulgences of wandering, non-essential-to-plot thoughts, making the characters more than pieces on a storyline chessboard. If you are a minimalist-writing reader, you might want to make slight adjustments your expectations, or not bother trying to read this sometimes-melancholic book. 

Death is a unique-in-tone, excellent novel, one that took me a few chapters to get into. Once I did, I was immersed in its characters and storyline. This is worth reading, possibly owning if you are into melancholic, quirky characters and sometimes philosophical books.  Followed by The Shadow Woman.

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