Post Mortem

From the bestselling author of The Girl in the Spider's Web comes another mystery led by detective duo Rekke and Vargas: this time, their hunt for a serial killer has a literary twist.

It’s 1988. Dag and his friend Pompe are on a road trip through Europe. As they speed through French towns and Basque villages in Dag’s red BMW convertible, they party and discuss Hemingway and Leonard Cohen. But as Pompe's drinking gets more intense, a darker side emerges. In Spain, the men meet a young waitress name Sandra, who has dreams of becoming a writer and is smitten with the two intellectual Scandinavians, especially Pompe, who represents the literary lifestyle she longs for. Before Dag goes home to Sweden, he decides to tell Sandra what Pompe might be capable of...

2008, Stockholm. We’re reintroduced to Professor Hans Rekke and his detective partner, Micaela Vargas, who has a new boyfriend she hasn't yet told Rekke about. They receive a surprise visit from a Spanish police chief inspector who is haunted by the unsolved, brutal murder of a young woman in the late 1980s. He believes the old case is connected to others over the years. Could there be a serial killer still on the loose, one who leaves numerical codes on the bodies of his victims? Can Rekke help decipher these signs before the killer strikes again?

Post Mortem switches between these two timelines: the last day of Sandra’s life and Rekke and Vargas’s search for clues, which lead them  to an egomaniacal writer, a widely loathed literary agent, and ultimately to Sandra's posthumously published short story. In yet another intricate and exciting puzzle mystery, David Lagercrantz draws on the literary world that he knows so well, resulting in a tale of guilt, shame, repressed memories, human depravity—and publishing.