The Hidden Child (Patrick Hedstrom and Erica Falck)
Long troubled by her late mother’s coldness toward her two daughters, writer Erica Falck begins to read her mother, Elsy’s, teenage diaries. She also discovers a Nazi war medal with the diaries and asks a retired history teacher to examine it. Within days, the teacher is bludgeoned to death. Then Britta, Elsy’s closest friend as a teenager, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is also murdered. Through the diaries, Erica intuits that the solution to the mystery is rooted in events that took place during WWII. Once again, Läckberg (The Stonecutter, 2012) employs Swedish history and her setting, Fjallbacka, the postcard-pretty village where Falck grew up, to craft an engaging tale that spans three generations of Fjallbackians. The author goes deep into the lives of a very large cast of characters, and some crime lovers might balk at a 520-plus–page novel that is almost half family saga. But taken as a whole, The Hidden Child will keep fans of Swedish crime guessing until the final pages. --Thomas Gaughan--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.