I do a lot of travelling on coaches and I can't read on them because I get car sick. So a while back I joined Audible and am now provided with an audiobook every month which keeps me very happy as I trundle along between Oxford and London. I've had a few disappointments, resulting not from the books but from the quality of the reading, which I've found is quite variable. I had to give up on Andrea Levy's The Long Song because I just didn't enjoy the way she read it. Generally, though, you may not be surprised to hear that I stick to crime, especially of the Nordic variety. It's not always brilliant, but it does help to pass an otherwise boring hour or so.
This one, though, was a real winner. I'd never heard of Lars Kepler, which turned out to be not all that surprising since it's a pseudonym for a husband and wife team of literary writers whose first, and hugely successful, foray into crime fiction this is. I wasn't really surprised to learn this, as there is a real intelligence (well, two real intelligences) behind this very powerful and very scary psychological thriller.
The novel begins with the brutal murders of several members of a family, the only survivor of which is a teenage boy who is badly wounded and apparently unable to communicate. The detective in charge of the case, Joona Linna, calls in hypnotist Eric Bark, who makes a horrific discovery about the truth behind the murders. But that's only the beginning. Soon Bark's own teenage son Benjamin is kidnapped from their apartment, and Eric and his wife Simone are flung into the most terrifying search for the kidnapper, who may or may not be the person responsible for the family killings. The search takes Eric back into his own past, when he was practising hypnosis with a group of extremely damaged individuals -- could one of them possibly be behind the kidnapping?
The action moves about through time, gradually revealing more and more of the complexities behind the various strands of the plot without ever losing the extreme tension which is generated. Benjamin has a rare blood disorder which means that he will die if his parents don't find him in time to give him his life-saving injection. The serial killer is on the loose and many lives are in danger as a result. Simone and Eric's marriage is in trouble and it's all made a great deal worse by the terrible stress of the situation. There are numerous twists, turns, and red herrings which will keep you guessing almost up to the end. As for the portraits of the various psychologically damaged people who inhabit this novel, you will not forget them in a hurry.
So -- not for the fainthearted, but truly excellent stuff, the by far the best of the Nordic crime I've read since Larsson. I can't wait for Kepler's follow up, though apparently it's not due out till next year.