Amongst the many birthday treats I allowed myself, which included tennis with Adam, lunch with mom (Akai Hana for sushi), basically not working (I took one client call -- they needed a 1099 to file taxes), coconut cake from New Hope Market, running fewer of the errands I thought I might, I finished the mystery novel I was reading: The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson. I had snapped up this total rando whodunnit at the library a month or so back in the course of looking for something else.
A decent if not great book, it apparently is the fourth but first translated into English of the Ann Lindell series. I say "apparently" because honestly there are so many members of the Uppsala police mentioned in the novel that I wasn't sure who the key one was till I looked at the author's Wikipedia page. Really it's a novel about Uppsala (home of Sweden's second oldest university) as a place, more than anything. The novel fairly brims with little moments of Scandinavian moralizing about society's responsibility to each of its members -- including psychopathic murderers -- and just little Scandi-moments: strollers with sleeping infants left just outside, people on disability from burn-out, etc. Ultimately the solution to the mystery arrives completely outside of anything the team had been investigating, in the last thirty pages, as opposed to emerging from hidden clues in the detective work they had done. Therefore the whole thing disappoints a little.
I may read another one if it crosses my path but won't blaze a trail to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment