Three criminals--a middle-class youth who enters the world of high-rollers through selling coke, a young Latin man who escapes from prison after being framed in a drug bust, and a Yugoslavian mob enforcer trying to keep custody of his daughter--cross and re-cross each other's paths in the Stockholm underworld in Jens Lapidus' Easy Money.
I have found a taste for Scandinavian mysteries, but this one reads like straight-up George Pelecanos, a hip, gritty urban thriller. Lapidus' energetic sketches of Swedish life from the indolent jet-setters on down to the immigrant taxi drivers showed me a side of that country I had not seen in other writers from Scandinavia.
For better or worse, Lapidus dispatches with a lot of the gloom common to these mysteries and writes a very American-style thriller that is the equal to his U.S. counterparts. How the disparate storylines dovetail in a cold-blooded finale is especially admirable.
For those fishing around for something new after finishing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy would do well by digging this one out. Recommended.
I have found a taste for Scandinavian mysteries, but this one reads like straight-up George Pelecanos, a hip, gritty urban thriller. Lapidus' energetic sketches of Swedish life from the indolent jet-setters on down to the immigrant taxi drivers showed me a side of that country I had not seen in other writers from Scandinavia.
For better or worse, Lapidus dispatches with a lot of the gloom common to these mysteries and writes a very American-style thriller that is the equal to his U.S. counterparts. How the disparate storylines dovetail in a cold-blooded finale is especially admirable.
For those fishing around for something new after finishing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy would do well by digging this one out. Recommended.
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