The sandman A Joona Linna novel

Review by New York Times Review

THE SETUP FOR "The Sandman" is a bit of a stop-me-if-you've-heard-this-one-before joke, a familiar recipe: A serial killer, so intelligent and seductive he seems able to murder people from beyond his maximum-security cell, matches wits with a worldweary, brilliant cop. Add ice and snow; serve warm-blooded for a "Silence of the Lambs"-goes-Nordic noir thriller. Good genre writing, however, is all about creating a comfy amity whose expectations are overthrown, and "The Sandman" - written by Lars Kepler, the pen name for the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril - is a dandy exercise in surprise. The novel commences with the return of Mikael Kohler-Frost, a young man missing and thought dead for the past 13 years. He staggers, malnourished and dazed, out of the Stockholm countryside, babbling that he's escaped from a sadist he calls the Sandman, and that his sister, Felicia, also missing for the same period, is alive but still being held captive. The man who interrogates him, a police detective named Joona Linna, is stumped: A sadistic criminal, Jurek Walter, is locked away in a heavily guarded psychiatric ward, convicted of the presumed deaths of Mikael and Felicia as well as other murders. So who is the Sandman? Linna enlists a colleague, Saga Bauer, to enter the hospital undercover. She is to pose as a patient and befriend Jurek, getting him to reveal what he knows about the Sandman so Joona can find and rescue Felicia before it's too late. All this is told via 181 short chapters, many less than two pages long. The desired effect is to keep things moving; it's as though the authors were editing each other as they wrote. ("Who needs that adjective? Delete!") "The Sandman" is the fourth in the Joona Linna series - is their method a formula? I read the first, "The Hypnotist," and skimmed the second, "The Nightmare." Yup: same structure, same quick-chapter pacing. But "The Sandman" has a fresher crackle than these predecessors, a more vigorous snap to its hardboiled frost. (I intuit that some credit should go to the Ahndorils' new English translator, Neil Smith.) The phrasing is rudely blunt. ("He walked down to the beautiful beach where his boys used to swim, took out his service pistol, fed a bullet into the chamber and shot himself in the head.") The scenes cut back and forth between hero and villain with brutal efficiency. Basically, a Lars Kepler thriller stops only to fixate on Joona's eyes, which distractingly transfix any number of characters who take in this tall hunk of melancholia. At various times, his peepers are described as "an intense gray," "as gray as a rainy sky," "as dark as lead" and just downright "very unusual." "The Sandman" makes Saga Bauer - faced with an increasingly violent Jurek in the psychiatric ward - as crucial to the crime-solving as Joona. Indeed, with her fierce athleticism and stoic grace under pressure, Saga is more of an action figure than Joona, who must do the heavy narrative lifting, pondering the metaphysical implications of a universe in which someone as evil as Jurek - and the Sandman - can exist. It's easy to identify with Joona: He feels gloomy and guilty about his work and its value. And, on occasion, who among us does not? A character like this makes us feel more optimistic about the world precisely because he fights his own pessimistic approach to that same world. With this as its subtext, "The Sandman" sends us off to dreamland with a nightmare that can make us happy. KEN TUCKER is a critic for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 7, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Thirteen years after he and his sister disappeared, Mikael Kohler-Frost stumbles toward police, nearly skeletal and covered in blood. Mikael pleads for police to find his sister, Felicia, who is still held captive by the Sandman. Mikael's reappearance resurrects Stockholm DI Joona Linna's worst nightmares: he knows that Sweden's most dangerous serial killer, Jurek Walter, masterminded the kidnappings. When Linna and his partner, Samuel, captured Walter years earlier, he swore he'd take their families as revenge. Then, while Walter's incarceration lulled the partners into complacency, his hidden accomplice snatched Samuel's family and drove him to suicide. Determined to find Felicia, Linna crafts a dangerous plan to draw clues from Walter. The task force plants Saga Bauer deep undercover in Walter's maximum-security psychiatric unit, gambling that Walter finds the brilliant (and beautiful) officer irresistibly intriguing. But, once inside, Saga is on her own to navigate the unforeseen dangers posed by the unit's predatory head psychiatrist. If any Scandinavian crime series is poised to top the characterization and gripping action of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, it's this one. Kepler has crafted a phenomenal hero in Linna, who wields intuition, strategic genius, and refreshing vulnerability against a foe as compelling and calculating as Hannibal Lecter.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Kepler (the pen name for the husband-and-wife writing team of Alexander and Alexandra Ahndoril) proves that a gifted storyteller can make something memorable from an overused plot in his nail-biting fourth novel featuring Det. Insp. Joona Linna (after 2013's The Fire Witness). Jurek Walter has been confined to an ultrasecure psychiatric ward near Stockholm for 13 years after being convicted of just two of the more than 20 murders he is suspected of having committed. Joona, who has always believed that Jurek had an accomplice, is vindicated when Mikael Kobler-Frost, a crime writer's son who was thought to have been killed by Jurek, manages to escape captivity and provides some information about his captor, whom he calls the Sandman. Mikael's revelation that his sister, who disappeared with him, is also still alive prompts the police to attempt a dangerous gambit: sending Insp. Saga Bauer into Jurek's ward posing as a patient to try to get him to reveal enough information to rescue Felicia. Kepler doesn't pull any punches, and his care in creating characters will make readers deeply invested in their fates. 75,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden). (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In the fourth entry (after The Fire Witness) of the internationally best-selling "DI Joona Linna" series, the Stockholm detective finds himself facing Jurek Walter again. He arrested the psychotic serial killer 13 years ago and always suspected he had an accomplice who remained free. Joona's theory is confirmed when a long-missing victim, Mikael, is found wandering on a railroad track. He has escaped from his kidnapper whom he thinks of as the Sandman, but his twin sister Felicia is still in captivity. Jurek is smart and dangerous, but they need to get him to talk if there's any chance of finding Felicia before it's too late. Joona plans a risky strategy: Insp. Saga Bauer will go undercover as a patient in the high-security psychiatric ward where Jurek is being held and try to draw out information from him. Joona has lost his partner and his family to Jurek and will stop at nothing to end the terror. VERDICT More dark psychological thriller than police procedural, this shiver-inducing read will have you turning pages until the cliff-hanger ending. For fans of Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Danish writer Sara Blaedel. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17.]-Melissa DeWild, Spring Lake Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

"You don't become a serial killer for no reason": the Swedish duo (The Fire Witness, 2013, etc.) who write under a single pseudonym return, and it isn't pretty.Leading the cast in the fourth novel in the series devoted to him, the smart, steely detective Joona Linna is sure that the psycho he helped put away is still conducting awful business behind bars. When a starved young man is spotted atop a railroad bridge, having escaped from captivity at the hands of yet another psycho"the Sandman took us," he says to police, meaningfullyLinna puts two and two together. That's not easy: the imprisoned bad guy, Jurek Walter, has a knack for whispering sweet nothings into the ears of anyone who will listen, programming them for mayhem, so much so that his jailers and psychiatrists wear earplugs in his presence. (So much for talk therapy.) Linna, who has searched every conceivable database to try to find out who Walter really is, tries a risky gambit: he sends his colleague, young detective Saga Bauer, into the lion's den to try to ferret out information about his victims and accomplices, for Linna is sure that Walter is not acting alone. He's not, though learning the eventual identity of the aforementioned Sandman may carry a whiff of red herring gone bad. Saga has to tough out some very unpleasant behavior while undercover inside the stir"The girl has a dozen knife wounds to her chest, deep cuts into her lungs and heart," Kepler writes of one inmate who gets in Walter's wayeven as Linna solves the mystery. Writing, as always, in short chapters, most just a couple of pages in length, and in telegraphic sentences, Kepler builds a story whose pace is occasionally off but that resolves in a satisfactory if blood-soaked manner. The yarn isn't as spine-tingling as, say, Jo Nesb's The Snowman or as action-packed as Stieg Larsson's original Millennium trilogy, but as Swedish mysteries go, it does the trick.Fans of Kepler's detective won't be disappointed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2018 Lars Kepler It's the middle of the night, and snow is blowing in from the sea. A young man is walking across a high railroad bridge, toward Stockholm. His face is as pale as misted glass. His jeans are stiff with frozen blood. He is walking between the rails, stepping from tie to tie. Fifty meters beneath him, the ice on the water is just visible, like a strip of cloth. A blanket of snow covers the trees. Snow is swirling in the glow from the container crane far below, and the oil tanks at the harbor are barely visible. Blood trickles down the man's lower left arm and drips from his fingertips. The rails sing as a night train approaches the two-kilometer-long bridge. The young man sways and sits down on the rail, then gets to his feet again and carries on walking. The air is turbulent in front of the train, and the view is obscured by the billowing snow. The locomotive has already reached the middle of the bridge when the engineer catches sight of the man on the track. He blows his horn and the figure almost falls. The man takes a long step to the left, onto the other track, and grabs hold of the flimsy railing. His clothes flap around his body. The bridge shakes violently under his feet. He stands still with his eyes wide open, his hands on the railing. Everything is swirling snow and enveloping darkness. His name is Mikael Kohler-Frost. He went missing thirteen years ago and was officially declared dead six years later.                   1 The steel gate closes behind the new doctor with a heavy clang. The sound echoes down the spiral staircase. Everything suddenly goes quiet, and Anders Rönn feels a shiver run down his spine. Today is his first day working in the Secure Criminal Psychology Unit at Löwenströmska Hospital. For the past thirteen years, the strictly isolated bunker has been home to the aging Jurek Walter. The young doctor doesn't know much about his patient, except the diagnoses: Schizophrenia, nonspecific. Chaotic thinking. Recurrent acute psychosis, with erratic and extremely violent episodes. Anders shows his ID at the entrance, removes his cell phone, and hangs the key to the gate in his locker before the guard opens the first steel security door. He goes in and waits for the door to close before walking to the next door. When a signal sounds, the guard opens the second door. Anders walks along the corridor toward the isolation ward's staffroom. Chief Physician Roland Brolin is a thickset man in his fifties, with sloping shoulders and cropped hair. He is smoking under the exhaust fan in the kitchen, leafing through an article on the pay gap between men and women in the health-care industry. "Jurek Walter must never be alone with any member of staff," he says. "He must never meet other patients. He never has any visitors, and he's never allowed out into the exercise yard. Nor is he--" "Never?" Anders asks. "Surely it's not policy to keep someone . . ." "No, it isn't," Roland says sharply. "So what's he actually done?" "Nothing but nice things," Roland says, heading toward the corridor. Even though Jurek Walter has committed the most heinous crimes of any serial killer in Swedish history, he is completely unknown to the public. The proceedings against him in the Central Court House and at the Court of Appeal were held behind closed doors, and all the les are strictly confidential. Anders and Roland pass through another security door, and a young woman with tattooed arms and pierced cheeks winks at them. "Come back in one piece," she says cheerily. "There's no need to worry," Roland says to Anders in a low voice. "Jurek Walter is a quiet elderly man. He doesn't fight, and he doesn't raise his voice. Our cardinal rule is that we never go into his cell. But Leffe, who was on the night shift last night, noticed that he had made some sort of knife and hidden it under his mattress, so, obviously, we have to confiscate it." "How do we do that?" Anders asks. "We break the rules." "We're going into Jurek's cell?" "You're going in. To ask nicely for the knife." "I'm going in?" Roland laughs loudly and explains that they're going to pretend to give the patient his normal injection of risperidone but will actually be giving him an overdose of Zypadhera. The chief runs his card through yet another reader and taps in a code. There's a bleep, and the lock of the security door whirrs. "Wait," Roland says, holding out a little box of yellow earplugs. "What are these for?" Roland looks at his new colleague with weary eyes, and sighs. "Jurek Walter will talk to you, quite calmly, probably perfectly reasonably," he says in a grave voice. "He will convince you to do some things you'll regret. His words will play in your mind over and over again, and later this evening, when you're driving home, you'll swerve into oncoming traffic and smash into a semi, or you'll stop off at the hardware store to buy an ax before you pick the kids up from preschool." "Should I be scared now?" Anders smiles and puts a pair of the earplugs in his pocket. "No, but hopefully you'll be careful," Roland says. Anders doesn't think of himself as lucky, but when he saw the advertisement in a medical journal for a full-time, long-term position at Löwenströmska Hospital, he had a good feeling. It's only a twenty- minute drive from home, and it could well lead to a permanent appointment. Since working as an intern at Skaraborg Hospital and in a health center in Huddinge, he has had to get by on temporary positions at the regional clinic of Sankt Sigfrids Hospital. The long drives to Växjö and the irregular hours proved difficult to manage with Petra's job in the Parks Department and Agnes's autism. Only two weeks ago, Anders and Petra had been sitting at the kitchen table trying to work out what on earth they were going to do. "We can't go on like this," Anders had said. "But what alternative do we have?" she whispered. "I don't know," Anders replied, wiping the tears from her cheeks. Agnes's teaching assistant at her preschool had told them that Agnes had had a difficult day. She had refused to let go of her milk glass, and the other children had laughed. She hadn't been able to accept that break time was over, because Anders hadn't come to pick her up as he usually did. He had driven straight back from Växjö but hadn't reached the preschool until six o'clock. Agnes was still sitting in the dining room with her hands around the glass when he arrived. When they got home, Agnes had stood in her room, staring at the wall beside the dollhouse, clapping her hands in that introverted way she had. They don't know what she can see there, but she says that gray sticks keep appearing, and she has to count them, and stop them. She does that when she's feeling particularly anxious. Sometimes ten minutes is enough, but that evening she stood there for more than four hours before they could get her into bed.   2 The last security door closes, and they head down the corridor to the isolation cells. The fluorescent light in the ceiling reflects off the linoleum floor. The textured wallpaper has a groove worn into it from the rail on the food cart. Roland puts his pass card away and lets Anders walk ahead of him toward the heavy metal door. Through the reinforced glass, Anders can see a thin man sitting on a plastic chair. He is dressed in blue jeans and a denim shirt. The man is clean-shaven, and his eyes seem remarkably calm. The many wrinkles covering his pale face look like the cracked clay at the bottom of a dried-up riverbed. Jurek Walter was found guilty of only two murders and one attempted murder, but there's compelling evidence linking him to nineteen others. Thirteen years ago, he was caught red-handed in Lill-Jan's Forest, on Djurgården, in Stockholm, forcing a fifty-year-old woman back into a coffin in the ground. She had been kept in the coffin for almost two years, but was still alive. The woman had sustained terrible injuries, she was malnourished, her muscles had withered away, she had appalling pressure sores and frostbite, and she had suffered severe brain damage. If the police hadn't followed and arrested Jurek Walter beside the coffin, he might never have been stopped. Now Roland takes out three small glass bottles containing yellow powder, puts some saline into each of the bottles, shakes them carefully, then draws the contents into a syringe. He puts his earplugs in and opens the small hatch in the door. There's a clatter of metal, and a heavy smell of concrete and dust hits them. In a dispassionate voice, Roland tells Jurek that it's time for his injection. The man lifts his chin and gets up softly from the chair, turns to look at the hatch in the door, and unbuttons his shirt as he approaches. "Stop and take your shirt off," Roland says. Jurek steps slowly forward and Roland quickly closes the hatch. Jurek stops, undoes the last buttons, and lets his shirt fall to the floor. His body looks as if it had once been in good shape, but now his muscles are loose and his wrinkled skin is sagging. Roland opens the hatch again. Jurek approaches and holds out his sinewy arm. Anders washes his upper arm with rubbing alcohol. Roland pushes the syringe into the soft muscle and injects the liquid too quickly. Jurek's hand jerks in surprise, but he doesn't pull his arm back until he's been given permission. Roland hurriedly bolts the hatch, removes his earplugs, smiles nervously to himself, and then looks inside. Jurek is stumbling toward the bed, where he stops and sits down. Suddenly he twists to look at the door, and Roland drops the syringe. He tries to catch it, but it rolls away across the floor. Anders steps forward and picks up the syringe, and when they both stand and turn back toward the cell, they see that the inside of the reinforced glass is misted. Jurek Walter has breathed on the glass and written "Joona" with his finger. "What does it say?" Anders asks weakly. "He's written 'Joona.'" "What the hell does that mean?" When the condensation clears, they see that Jurek Walter is sitting as if he hasn't moved. He looks at the arm where he got the injection, massages the muscle, then looks at them through the glass. "It didn't say anything else?" Anders asks. "No." There's a bestial roar from the other side of the heavy door. Jurek has slid off the bed and is on his knees, screaming. The sinews in his neck are taut, his veins swollen. "How much did you actually give him?" Anders asks. Jurek's eyes roll back and turn white. He reaches out a hand to support himself and stretches one leg but topples over backward. He hits his head on the bedside table. Then he screams, and his body jerks spasmodically. "Jesus Christ," Anders whispers. Jurek slips onto the floor, his legs kicking uncontrollably. He bites his tongue, and blood sprays out over his chest. He lies there on his back, gasping. "What do we do if he dies?" "Cremate him," Roland says. Jurek is cramping again, his whole body shaking, and his hands flail in every direction, until they suddenly stop. Roland looks at his watch. Sweat is running down his cheeks. Jurek Walter whimpers, rolls onto his side and tries to get up, but fails. "You can go inside in a couple of minutes," Roland says. "Am I really going in there?" "He'll soon be completely harmless." Jurek is crawling on all fours, bloody slime drooling from his mouth. He sways and slows down until he finally slumps to the floor and lies still.   Excerpted from The Sandman by Lars Kepler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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