As painful as these killings may be, though, there is little voyeurism in them. The reader does not see them happen. Investigators may throw up at the scene, but the upchucking is never extravagant or cathartic. The police react, they clean up, and they emerge, shaken perhaps, but ready to go on with their jobs.
Swedish crime novels, more than most, are about the slow, rippling effect of a violent act on the minds, souls and social fabric of those they leave behind.
Nowhere is the rippling slower than in Inger Frimansson's Goodnight, My Darling (Caravel, $16), whose protagonist seeks revenge for wrongs done to her when she was a girl.
Frimansson, by her own account neither a bully nor a victim during her youth, recalls seeing a group of boys grind a girl's face into the snow. The girl's resulting asthma attack made a profound impression. "I remember how we stood there looking, clinically looking, and now we understood that this was asthma," she says.
Years later, after Frimansson started writing, "I felt that I had to use my fantasy to help Justine get her revenge. . . . I decided to send her out into the world so she could kill."
Reviewers invoke Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels when discussing Eriksson, but Eriksson takes the ensemble approach further. Killers, neighbors, workers, wives and lovers get their say, the shifts in point of view evoking a reader's sympathy for all but the very worst characters.
Early in The Princess of Burundi, a man with a criminal past is found murdered, likely tortured to death. "Little John is dead," the police chief tells investigators. "There are probably those of us who don't think that's much of a loss. . . . That would be a pity, however."
