Åke Edwardson books in order

Looked at from the outside, the annual summer camp in the countryside seems idyllic. But for Kenny, a boy with a Samurai soul, it is no more than a prison camp, run by a sadistic woman who is sometimes helped by her salacious son, Christian. 

To escape the adults, Kenny and his "samurai" friends sneak out to the forest to build a secret castle. It’s off-limits to the girls, but a female camper named Kerstin begs Kenny to show her the castle. But suddenly she disappears, and Kenny realizes something terrible must have happened to her. Something that points to the old woman who runs the camp but even more so to her strange, creepy son.

Erik Winter joins forces with his British counterparts after a series of brutal murders of young men in London and his own city of Gothenburg. The killer, dubbed Hitchcock, appears to have filmed the butchery, as evidenced by traces of a tripod stand in the victims' blood.

The trail naturally leads into the seamy world of snuff films, but the big break comes from a burglar who noticed some blood-stained clothing in an apartment he broke into.

It's August and the annual Gothenburg Party is in full swing. But this year the bacchanalian blowout is simmering with ethnic discord spurred by nativist gangs. 

When a woman is found murdered in the park-her identity as inscrutable as the blood-red symbol on the tree above her body-Winter's search for her missing child leads him from sleek McMansions to the Gothenburg fringes, where "northern suburbs" is code for "outsider" and the past is inescapable-even for Sweden's youngest chief inspector.

Like his fellow countryman Henning Mankell, Åke Edwardson is a successful figure on the international mystery scene and a brilliant discovery for lovers of intricate, psychologically charged, and stylish crime novels. 

With Sun and Shadow, Edwardson introduces readers to detective Erik Winter, the youngest chief inspector in Sweden, who wears sharp suits, cooks gourmet meals, has a penchant for jazz, and is about to become a father. He's also moody and intuitive, his mind inhabiting the crimes he's trying to solve. In this atmospheric, heart-stopping tale, Winter's troubles abound—and a bloody double murder on his doorstep is just the beginning.

It's summer in Sweden. As the coastal city of Gothenburg suffers through a heat wave, Chief Inspector Erik Winter broods over a series of unsolved rape-murders. The crimes bear an eerie resemblance to a five-year-old case that the mercurial detective has refused to let go cold. Has the same rapist reemerged to taunt him, or is a copycat at work? And can Winter find a common thread among the victims before there are more of them?

The autumn gloom comes quickly on the Swedish city of Gothenburg, and for Detective Inspector Erik Winter the days seem even shorter, the nights bleaker, when he is faced with two seemingly unrelated sets of perplexing crimes. 

The investigation of a series of assaults and a string of child abductions takes Winter to "the flats", the barren prairies of rural Sweden whose wastelands conceal crimes as sinister as the land itself. Winter must deduce the labyrinthine connections between the cases before it is too late and his own family comes into danger.

A brother and sister believe that their father has gone missing. They think he may have traveled in search of his father, who was presumed lost decades ago in World War II. Meanwhile, there are reports that a woman is being abused, but she can’t be found and her family won’t tell the police where she is. Two missing people and two very different families combine in this dynamic and suspenseful mystery by the Swedish master Åke Edwardson.

Gothenburg’s Chief Inspector Erik Winter travels to Scotland in search of the missing man, aided there by an old friend from Scotland Yard. Back in Gothenburg, Afro-Swedish detective Aneta Djanali discovers how badly someone doesn’t want her to find the missing woman when she herself is threatened.

A YOUNG WOMAN IS DISCOVERED hanged in a room in a decrepit hotel, and Gothenburg’s Chief Inspector Erik Winter must try to figure out what happened. As Winter looks around, he realizes that he was in the same hotel room many years earlier, when it was the last known location of a woman who subsequently disappeared and was never found. The two women seem to have nothing in common except for this hotel room, but Winter suspects that there may be other connections.

The young woman’s parents are bereft and unable to explain the puzzling contents of a note she left behind. Winter, however, senses that they are holding back some secret that might help him to find her murderer. As he pursues his hunch and digs into the old police report on the woman who disappeared—one of his first cases as a young detective—Winter becomes increasingly convinced that the two cases are somehow related. 

Room No. 10 is a first-rate thriller, suffused with the gray seaside beauty of Gothenburg and filled with the characters that Åke Edwardson’s readers have come to love: Winter, the veteran detective who veers between pessimism and optimism but never gives up; Bertil Ringmar, the methodical old-timer whose analytical mind keeps everyone focused; hotheaded Fredrik Halders, whose temper sometimes overwhelms his passion for justice; and Aneta Djanali, Halders’s girlfriend, an immigrant from Burkina Faso whose ability to talk to other women can open new leads. As compelling as they are dedicated, they are an unforgettable team determined to find a bizarre killer.