Translated by Ian Giles — Are you ready for a cold case mystery from Sweden? Professor Hans Rekke and police officer Micaela Vargas team up once again in Post Mortem, the third in Lagercrantz’s series featuring the unlikely duo, following Fatal Gambit (2024) and Dark Music (2022).
It’s 1988. Two good friends, Dag and Pompe, head off on a European road trip, travelling through France and Northern Spain. The young men’s carefree adventure takes a dark turn when Pompe reveals a violent side to his character when drinking. Pompe’s erratic behaviour alarms Dag, who unsuccessfully tries to distance himself from his volatile friend.
During a local festival in Santander, Sandra Ramirez, a young waitress and aspiring writer, is brutally murdered and left under an old oak tree outside town. Two unknown young men, apparently journalists and aspiring writers, were seen on the morning of 12 July, the day she was murdered, at the café where Sandra worked part time. Years later, Sandra’s uncompleted short story would shed some light on her own murder posthumously.
Moving forward to 2008, Rafael Corales, a deputy police commissioner in Pamplona, knocks on Professor Hans Rekke’s door in Stockholm. Corales believes Sandra’s unresolved murder is tied to a serial killer who targets well-read women, breaks their fingers, and carves sequential numbers into their bodies. New evidence has revealed that the killer might be someone from Sweden’s literary scene.
So in Post Mortem we have narrative switches between the two timelines, following Rekke and Vargas’s investigation through Stockholm’s literary circles and going back to Sandra Ramirez’s final days.
Hans Rekke is a modern-day Sherlock Holmes who shares similarities with his literary counterpart. He is a brilliant pianist and an expert in deduction. Like Holmes, Rekke also has a brother in politics, Magnus, who has a tendency to meddle in his affairs. He’s also a shamed academic who couldn’t handle the pressure and can now barely make it out of the house. Not the most dependable investigator.
Rekke’s partner, Micaela Vargas, a street cop from Husby, a residential district in Stockholm, serves as the stable force keeping Rekke in line. At the moment, she lives with him and finds herself juggling a complex personal life that includes an unexpected pregnancy, a fairly new relationship with Caspar Amiri, and a precarious partnership with Rekke.
Rekke and Vargas unearth more murders with the same telltale signs. In 1994, Regina Lassen, who taught creative writing courses, was found dead on a stud farm on the outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark, with a marking carved on her body and broken fingers. According to the marking, Regina could have been the serial killer’s fifth victim.
Lagercrantz sneakily uses similar-sounding names to keep the identity of the killer hidden. It certainly befuddles the reader. This time around he also uses the old adage ‘write what you know’, and it works. The result is a literary crime thriller populated by authors and literary agents, featuring references to the Spanish poet Lorca and folk singer Leonard Cohen. Pontus Bremer, for example, is a highly successful but narcissistic author who includes graphic depictions of violence in his novels. Oliver Popov is an influential literary agent and importer of expensive Californian wines who everyone wants to befriend, while Dag and Pompe are both literary-minded young men. Any one of them could be the serial killer.
When I read Dark Music back in 2022, the over-sexualisation of women was somewhat jarring. Post Mortem is lighter on overt descriptions of its female characters. Some sexism does still seep through in Magnus’s perception of women. It remains noticeable, however, that women are portrayed as either versions of Mata Hari or as victims, with little grey area in between.
Lagercrantz combines a cold-case investigation with an insider glimpse into the literary inner circle – albeit a fictional one. There is enough to keep one’s attention here, but as is often the case with his novels, it feels as if there is too much distraction and not enough grounding substance. It does, however, have all the trademarks of Nordic Noir and will satisfy avid readers of the genre.
Two more novels are planned in the series to complete a set of five. Consequently, the story ends on a minor cliffhanger when Micaela learns of a family secret. But do not despair; the main mystery presented is neatly resolved in a satisfying ending.
For more Swedish crime fiction with a literary twist, try John Ajvide Lindkvist’s The Writing’s in the Water.
MacLehose Press
Print/Kindle/iBook
£12.99
CFL Rating: 3 Stars
