Fatal Gambit
By the author of THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Claire Lidman died fourteen years ago.
So why does she appear in the background of a recent holiday snap taken in Venice?
Her husband brings the anomaly to Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Initial scepticism gives way to cautious belief, but Rekke is falling apart again and Vargas has her own problems. Her gangster brother is threatening to silence her if she doesn't get off his case.
Meanwhile, Rekke's daughter Julia has a new boyfriend she's determined to keep secret. He sees something in her she can't see herself, but there are hints of a darker side.
Most troubling of all, Rekke is hearing whispers of a name he hasn't heard for years. A rival from his youth whose restless evil links all the threads in this incipient case. The pieces are laid and he's already one move ahead. The name of the game is revenge.
Translated from the Swedish by Ian Giles
Reviews for Dark Music:
"One Holmes himself would have loved to solve" Independent
"A rich, engrossing novel" Literary Review
"A complex and dark Sherlock Holmesian tale" Irish Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Lagercrantz's excellent second investigation for Stockholm police officer Micaela Vargas and professor Hans Rekke (after Dark Music), the pair reopens a cold case when a holiday snapshot suggests a long-missing banker may be alive and well in Venice. Financier Claire Lidman was last seen in 1999 and reported dead 14 years later—but her husband, Samuel, brings Vargas a photograph that he swears contains the supposedly dead woman in the background. Vargas loops in forensics expert Rekke, and the more they investigate, the more they start to believe Samuel. Soon, they uncover Claire's connections to a vast conspiracy involving high-ranking Swedish government officials, international finance, and organized crime in the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Vargas and Rekke face their own dramas: Rekke's daughter gets a new boyfriend who causes friction between the friends, and an old enemy emerges from the professor's past. Part of the fun is Lagercrantz's deliberate use of Holmesian tropes—there's a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind, and Vargas and Rekke echo Holmes and Watson in more ways than one—but he departs from Conan Doyle's template with a complex, borderline-baroque mystery plot, to thrilling effect. By the end of the pulse-pounding denouement, readers will be breathless for the next installment.
