The Woman Inside

April 15, 2023
When a wealthy heiress and her husband are found dead in their mansion in the city of Lund, Sweden, a web of deception is discovered to underlie not only their lives, but those of the people whose fates intersect with theirs. This dark, claustrophobic novel opens with a matter-of-fact police report: "The blinds are down, and all lights are off. Against the wall is a bed with a headboard. On the bed is another dead body." The woman downstairs has died of a head injury, the man upstairs, of a drug overdose. Could this be a double murder, staged to look like murder-suicide? The truth emerges incrementally and obliquely in a sinuous narrative that focuses mainly on two young women whose distinctive voices lend the novel some badly needed credibility. Both are students; Karla Larsson makes money cleaning houses, while Jennica Jungstedt moonlights as a psychic adviser. "Does it make you feel less alone to call it something else?" Jennica is asked by Steven Rytter, a charming older man she meets on Tinder. She insists on using the term living solo. But such distinctions dissolve when that first date turns into a storybook romance rich in champagne and roses. Karla, meanwhile, happens to be the person employed to clean Steven's already immaculate house. "Steven's a doctor and works almost all the time," she learns. "His wife just lies around sleeping, totally zonked on drugs." That's not the story Steven tells Jennica, of course. Then again, he is just one liar among many here--as the novel's intersecting narratives and brief transcripts of police interrogations attest. The suspense introduced in the early chapters, however, wears thin as the author introduces one too many subplots and fails to stage a convincing denouement. An angst-ridden but finally weak thriller.

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May 1, 2023
In Stockholm's university district, disastrous choices draw a struggling single father, a law student, and a directionless psychic hotline counselor into a double murder. Bill Olsson, an unemployed gambling addict, struggles to raise his young daughter alone. His boarder, Karla, dreams that a law degree will pull her out of the chaos in her drug-addicted mother's orbit. And Jennica counsels callers to her psychic hotline to stick up for themselves, while determinedly explaining away signs that her new boyfriend, Stephen Rytter, is hiding something. Rytter's secret, his invalid heiress wife, Regina, begs her housecleaner, Karla, to keep her company. When Karla realizes that Stephen has been debilitating his wife with sedatives, she and Bill seize the opportunity to free his daughter from impending poverty. Unfortunately, their bungling blackmail plot leaves Stephen and Regina dead, and they must match wits with Stockholm's finest to escape arrest. Through Bill's, Karla's, and Jennica's voices, alienation, self-preservation, and hope propel the story toward calamity with unrelenting suspense; highly recommended for fans of psychological thrillers.

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