Rekke Series

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 killer has a literary twist.

Professor Hans Rekke and police officer Micaela Vargas have earned a reputation for solving the unsolvable. But they’ve never been confronted by a serial killer. Until now.

Rekke receives a visit from Spanish chief inspector Rafael Corales, who is unable to forget the brutal, unsolved murder of a young woman in Santander in 1988. Now other bodies have come to light, marked with signs that seem to be some kind of numerical order. Still recovering from his latest manic episode, his relationship with Vargas strained by a secret she’s keeping, Rekke agrees to help decipher these signs before the killer strikes again.

The victim was an aspiring writer, and clues from her posthumously published short story about a stray dog draw Rekke and Vargas deep into the murk of Sweden’s literary scene. To unmask the killer, Rekke must relearn the difference between fact and fiction, and discover what really happened that night back in the 1980s.

In yet another intricate and exciting puzzle mystery, David Lagercrantz draws on the literary world that he—and we—know all too well to tell a story about guilt, shame, repressed memories, human depravity, and publishing.

David Lagercrantz’s detective duo, Rekke and Vargas, returns in a new installment of the internationally best-selling series that began with Dark Music (“A classic mystery . . . One Holmes himself would have loved to solve” —The Independent).

Dead women should not show up in photos fourteen years beyond the grave . . . But if anyone is likely to recognize Claire Lidman, it’s her husband, Samuel. He brings the photo to Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Their initial skepticism gives way to cautious belief—but where will this case lead them?

Meanwhile, Rekke’s daughter, Julia, has a new boyfriend she’s determined to keep secret. When word gets out, Micaela’s world collapses around her, and Rekke is forced to confront a nemesis from his youth.

Plunging us back into the political upheaval and financial crisis of the 1990s, as the Iron Curtain is finally lifted, the second Rekke and Vargas investigation sees our heroes grapple with a fiendish case that affects them both in profoundly personal ways.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, an exhilarating new thriller from the best-selling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web—a murder investigation in which two unlikely allies race to uncover a shadowy international conspiracy.

Professor Hans Rekke is a world authority on interrogation techniques, capable of dizzying feats of logic and observation. He was born into wealth and power and has a picture-perfect wife and daughter. But he also has a fragile psyche that falls apart under pressure.

Micaela Vargas is a street-smart police officer, the daughter of Chilean political refugees, who grew up in the projects on the outskirts of Stockholm and has two brothers on the wrong side of the law. She is tenacious and uncompromising, and desperate to prove herself to her fellow cops.

Micaela needs Hans’s unique mind to help her solve the case of a murdered asylum-seeker from Afghanistan. Hans needs Micaela to save him from himself. Together, they need to find the killer before they’re both silenced for good.