AUTUMN KILLING

This is the third in the Malin Fors series by the award winning Swedish novelist Mons Kallentoft and the fourth is to be published early in 2013.

Detective Inspector Fors is highly regarded in the Linköping police force for her investigative powers, although not for her addiction to alcoholism. As a result of that, she has a highly troubled personal life with her partner Janne and teenage daughter Tove who has recently been the victim of an attempted murder.

When the current owner of Skogså castle is found murdered in its moat, Malin battles with both the complexities of the case and her own emotional problems, the one exacerbating the other. Told from many viewpoints, including that of the ghostly murder victim, the story unwinds through the dovetailing of the characters’ stories into Malin’s own past traumas.

Mons Kallentoft is a fine writer and this is the great strength of the novel. His complicated crafting of the plot and the presentation of the text, however, do not always make for easy reading. Nor does the author’s treatment of Malin herself, whose grasp of the case tends to get lost in the amount of space given to her alcoholism and private life as well as by the multi-viewpoint sections. Overall however Autumn Killing is a dramatic and well written contribution to an interesting series.