For the Missing - Lina Bengtsdotter
There's not a lot of originality in Lina Bengtsdotter's debut thriller set in the backwoods of Sweden. Charline Lager - 'Charlie' Lager - the hard drinking lead detective with family issues is a bit of a walking cliché but she certainly has character and, with her background outside of the normal career ladder, you can see how she got where she is and how she has the potential to add a different perspective in future cases. The investigation into a missing girl in For the Missing might be a little straightforward then but there's some degree of insight in Bengtsdotter, and its this insight into how social backgrounds can lead to crime without the perpetrator even having the awareness that they are committing a crime that is what the novel really has going for it. It's the disappearance of Annabelle Roos, a seventeen year old girl living in Gullspang, a small manufacturing town of some 6,000 inhabitants that brings Charlie back to the neighbourhood where she gr...