Torquil MacLeod's Murder in Malmo

 

My pleasure reading has often been made more pleasurable by selecting books set in places I have visited for more than the old “if it’s Tuesday it’s Belgium” regimen.  This preference clearly accounts for my love of stories set in the American Southwest and the cities and byways of the British Isles.

Let me now ask you to focus on a more unusual area by encouraging you to sample some of the work of a Scotsman by the name of Torquil MacLeod who writes Nordic Noir mysteries about a female detective working out of Malmo, Sweden. The series is available on Kindle at minimal cost.    

MacLeod was born in Edinburgh and spent 36 years as an advertising copywriter before his eldest son moved to Skane (far southern Sweden). Soon he was visiting his son and his family more often and started writing a mystery series that is centered in the Swedish city of Malmo, but skitters off to various places in England, Finland, Prague, and Berlin when the necessities of plot point to  additional travel.

My Malmo experience is slight. I have seen it only through a train window while traveling from Copenhagen to Stockholm. The city was once a major ferry port as the narrow gap there between Denmark and Sweden had required a short sea voyage for hundreds of years. Now it is one end point of a seven-mile-long engineering miracle called the Oresend Bridge and Tunnel.  It is the longest road/rail bridge in Europe and enables direct vehicle and train traffic from Scandinavia to anywhere in Europe.   

Few tourists stop in Malmo today, but my memory of crossing that bridge when I saw it was the main city featured in Mr. MacLeod’s detective series was intriguing enough to get me to put down .99 to get a copy of Murder in Malmo on my Kindle. There are now several books in the series and they are all fun to read. The chief character is a perfect new age Nordic Noir heroine--Inspector Anita Sundstrom. She is a divorcee who was unlucky in love the first time around and now finds herself reluctant to commit even while falling for new partners. She is a complex figure who is good at her job, but finds her overweight boss a trial and some of her team members less than competent. She has a college age son who seems to be frittering his life away in the early books but later finds love with a young Iraqui woman who is the sister of one of her co-workers.

MacLeod gives his detective an English birth and then a move to Sweden. The Swedish police then send her back to Britain for a training year with the London constabulary. This background and her mastery of both languages makes for plots that often utilize connections and characters in both countries.

Sundstrom’s team includes a young Muslim detective and her own son has a relationship with the sister of that young man. This allows MacLeod to mine the holes in the Nordic socialist heaven—many of which center on the recent immigration of dark-skinned peoples into the blond fair-faced Scandinavian populace.  

The plot In Murder in Malmo centers on Inspector Sundstrom encountering a long-time female antagonist who has just been appointed to head up a cold case unit. The chosen case just happens to be one of Sundstrom’s first cases and was never satisfactorily solved. As she works on a modern murder, she is also pulled backward in time and a rethinking the old case. This gives you two mysteries (one old and one new) that seem totally disconnected at first but then begin to merge. It is a device MacLeod and several other mystery writers seem inclined to use.   

Along the way there is still plenty of the dark violence the “noir” genre promises. The murders pile up and innocents suffer.  Detective Sundstrom slugs it out and bears the scars. She does not shy away from drawing and using her weapon.

MacLeod’s attention to local and historic detail is also impressive. He seems to have absorbed every street, every building, every park in his locations whether they be in Berlin, Malmo, London, or other small towns in the Swedish countryside.  I am reminded of how Anita and her British lover travel to Berlin to piece together an old occurrence and link it to how the cold and controlling environment of old Communist East Berlin architecture has been put to modern use yet somehow still exudes the very stench of its totalitarian past.    

In thinking about similarities to other mystery series, I note that Inspector Sundstrom resembles DI Hillary Greene in Faith Martin’s books about an Oxford based female detective. Her DI Greene also has a sharp investigative mind, a cadre of disparate teammates, and a bad divorce in her past. You can get her first book titled Murder on the Oxford Canal for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. Neither of these series are as complicated, as lush in description, or as psychologically deep as Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache, but they offer plenty of satisfaction for idol hour reads. s

And a little plug for Penny's latest book that I have just finished and will be writing about shortly.