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Published Jun 2012
464 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
When the ice melts, what remains?
Thirty-four years old, blond, single, divorced with a teenage daughter, Fors is the most driven superintendent who has ever worked on the police force in her small, isolated town. And the most talented. In her job, she is constantly moving through the borderland between life and death. Her path in life is violent and hazardous.
Linköping, Sweden, is surrounded by a landscape of plains and forests - a fault line on the edges of society where time seems to have stood still and where some people live entirely according to their own rules. In the early hours of a frigid night, during the coldest February anyone can remember, the bloody body of an obese man, stripped bare and horribly mutilated, is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of a frozen, snow-covered, and windswept plain not far from town.
The young superintendent Malin Fors is assigned to the case. Together with her colleagues from the Investigation Section of Linköping’s Crime Unit, she must track down the identity of the man in the tree and the reason why he ended up there. And at the same time they must follow in the frigid wake of a killer who has just begun his work. It is a manhunt that will take Malin into the darkest corners of the human heart where the sins of the past - hidden away - all too often wreak havoc from one generation to the next.
"The case develops with painstaking slowness, allowing for a detailed, nuanced portrait of the relationship of Fors with her 13-year-old daughter as well as with her fellow officers ... Readers will look forward to the next three volumes in the series, already scheduled to appear in successive years." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. There are no clues to the man’s identity, which leads to wonderfully spare meditations on identity itself." - Booklist
This information about Midwinter Blood was first featured
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After being awarded the Swedish equivalent to the Whitbread Award for his debut novel Pesetas, Mons Kallentoft chose to give his own unique take on the classic Scandinavian crime novel. His success was immediate. The first book in the series about superintendent Malin Fors received unanimous praise from the national critics; it also conquered the bestseller charts and has today sold more than 300,000 copies in Sweden alone.
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