With twelve Erik Winter novels published in countries as diverse as Italy, Norway, France, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany?where the series has sold more than 700,000 copies?it?s only a matter of time before an American readership discovers what Europe has already declared: Åke Edwardson is a European master of the stylish and gritty crime novel.
In Never End, the second Erik Winter novel to be translated into English, a heat wave is smothering the Swedish coastal city of Gothenburg. School is out, and parks and beaches are teeming with people. But a spate of unsolved rape/murders casts a disturbing shadow on this particular summer. Chief Inspector Erik Winter, now forty-one and a father, assembles the scant but grisly details of the crimes, and begins to see an eerie connection to a five-year-old unsolved rape/murder, a case he, in typically obsessive fashion, has refused to let go cold. Has the same rapist reemerged to taunt the police and flaunt his stolen freedom, or are these copycat crimes? In the absence of any hard leads, and haunted by the case he could not solve, Winter desperately hunts for a link bridging the victims, convinced that each crime holds the key to the others. Someone knows more than they are letting on, and Winter knows they are running out of time. Never End is a chilling, moody novel replete with Hitchcockian depictions of Gothenburg?s vibrant summer spaces and seamy dark corners, that will appeal to readers of George Pelecanos and Elizabeth George