The Detective Inspector Huss series gets good reviews as Scandi-crime so I bought the first book in the hope of having a new series to follow. I’m now at the forty percent mark and I’m setting it aside.
Maybe my mistake was going back to the first book. The Swedish version of the book was published in 1998, nearly twenty years ago, so it’s describing a world that isn’t there any more, but it’s describing it in a way that takes the period for granted, sliding over the surface rather than digging for the details that would have given it period feel,
Perhaps reading the novel in translation accounts for feeling that I’m constantly at a distance from the characters, even when I’m in their heads. The first person accounts feel more like stage directions than interior monologues.
The plot is interesting enough, the murder of an unpleasant, rich, man who heads a family that is deeply unhappy and who seems to have long term relationships that may be toxic.
The plot rolls out via a very familiar Police Procedural route that, perhaps with the passing of time, seems very familiar and unsurprising.
There’s nothing wrong with this book except that I’m not sufficiently engaged with the characters to spend the time that it would take to finish the book
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