MARI JUNGSTEDT'S DANGEROUS GAME

Mari Jungstedt's series of police procedurals set on the Swedish island of Gotland, and starring Anders Knutas, started out as one of the best of the Nordic new wave. There were many familiar elements: Knutas was a particularly thoughtful everyman Depressive Detective, there was a well-drawn ensemble, and the addition of television journalism gave it a touch of the point of view that works so well for Lisa Marklund. What was particularly strong was the sense of isolated place: Visby, especially the old town of this once influential port, contrasted nicelty with the rugged barren sense of Gotland itself. Like Mankell's Ystad, Visby turned out to be particularly crime-ridden paradise, but it acted as a sort of microcosm for the Swedish society it could in a sense observe at a distance.

The Dangerous Game, the sixth Knutas novel, takes a wider view, being set in the world of high-priced fashion modelling, and thus also in Stockholm. The story is built around Jenny Levin, a teenaged modelling sensation who happens to come from a farm on Gotland. When Sweden's best-known fashion photographer, with whom Jenny is having an affair, is murdered on a Gotland shoot, the investigation falls to Knutas and his team. And it just happens that the local TV reporter Johan Berg's partner is a friend of the Levin family.

Jungstedt's real strength is charting the choppy waters of the relationships of this cast; Knutas is discovering his jealousy of his colleague Karin's happy relationship, just as he seems to be making progress with his own marriage, at least until his obsession with solving the murder interferes. Berg is likewise driven to family trouble by his concentration on work. The investigation gives Jungstedt lots of room to explore those craggy paths.

But running alongside the main story is another, involving Agnes, a former model now confined in a home suffering extreme anorexia. This is one of the dark sides of the fashion world, and Jungstedt conveys it in chilling detail. But because this is a novel, it points the way toward the solution. Writers often make this work by giving the solution away, and writing from the killer's perspective. But here the killer's identity is kept secret, with a series of red herrings that become less and less effective. So that even a nice twist at the end has been telegraphed in advance, and fails to surprise as it should.

This is disappointing mainly because Jungstedt does such a good job of getting the reader involved, and keeping the story moving on its multiple levels. And despite the let-down of predictability, it leaves one looking forward to a return trip to Visby.

The Dangerous Game by Mari Jungstedt

translated by Tiina Nunnally

Doubleday £12.99 ISBN 9780857521507

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BITING INTO LIZA MARKLUND'S RED WOLF

Red Wolf is the fifth in the series following intrepid reporter Annika Bengtzon, immediately following The Bomber, which was fourth in the series but, confusingly enough, the first published in English translation. Bengtzon is back to work but still recovering from her tunnel ordeal at the hands of the eponymous terrorist. Travelling to the far north of Sweden to write about a terrorist incident at a Swedish air base forty years earlier, she is drawn into a series of murders which begin with a local reporter who was working on the same thing. Soon Bengtzon finds herself in the middle of an old Swedish revolutionary cell, whose leader, like Carlos, became an international assassin for hire and now has returned to his homeland to die. And perhaps kill.

It's a complicated plot, replete with terrorist issues that resonate in today's climate, and with a serious reflection on the fate of the extreme left within Sweden's evolving social democratic system. But, as ever, the real drive of the novel comes from Bengtzon herself, and her life. She's still a bull in a china shop, both at her newspaper and with her husband, and her experiences have taken some of her always shaky confidence away. What is most impressive is the way Marklund shows us Annika best through other characters: the reactions of her husband, considering an affair, as he contemplates her qualities; the inablity of her friend Anne to cope with personal problems of her own. In the end what makes Bengtzon so interesting is that she often is less than sympathetic, but she is always driven by her own innate sense of justice and fairness, which puts us on her side, especially when faced with government apparatchicks and newspaper editors. And in fact, that's the other real strength of this series, the way Bengtzon's commitment to old fashioned journalism is constantly at odds with those in power who prefer not to be investigated. And in Red Wolf, she finds her investigations being simultaneously blocked by her editor and used for commercial opportunity by her publisher.

It's easy to see why Marklund would be one of James Patterson's choices to collaborate with. She's one of the more approachable of the Scandinavian writers; her prose is utilitarian at best, and that comes through in this translation, but she's able to mix adroitly the personal with large scale plots, and of course, as a woman she brings a new dimension to the Patterson machine. The best thing one might say about Red Wolf is that it makes the reader willing to test the Patterson waters with their collaboration, The Postcard Killers.

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund
Corgi, £6.99, ISBN 9780552162319