Slowly We Die by Emelie Schepp

 

(pb; 2016: third book in the Jana Berzelius series. Translated from the Swedish by Suzanne Martin Cheadle.)

From the back cover

“A tragic incident on the operating table leaves a patient damaged for life and leads a young surgeon to abandon his profession as a physician. . . Now, years later, a series of senseless, gruesome murders are rocking the same medical community.

“Then murderous revenge. . . The weapon? A surgical scalpel. But who exactly is preying on these victims? And why? What does this grisly pattern reveal? And who will be the one to stop it? Special prosecutor Jana Berzelius, who has her own dark secrets to hide, is in charge of the investigation. What she can’t know, until she is finally closing in on the murderer, is just how her mother’s recent death is intimately connected.”

Review

Slowly, like the two Jana Berzelius books that preceded it, is a gripping, reader-immersive read. The set-up has changed, with Jana’s travails sharing equal story-space with a medical-personnel murder mystery, with Danilo Peña (who’s escaped police custody) posing a different kind of threat—seemingly relatively benign, but potentially more invasive. Slowly is another skillfully woven thriller by Schepp, one worth owning, and one that makes me wish that Schepp’s fourth Berzelius novel, Daddy’s Boy (Swedish: Pappas Pojke), was translated into English and released in English-reading countries.