Spring Remains by Mons Kallentoft
NO 4 IN THE SERIES ABOUT POLICE INSPECTOR MALIN FORS.
The spring sunshine is beaming over Linköping and its still winter-pale inhabitants who are enjoying the weather from the pavement cafés by the town square. Swallows are circling the sky, colourful tulips are radiating from the market stalls and a mother with two children approaches a cash machine. But then, suddenly, the peace is violently disrupted by a heavy explosion, and Linköping will never be the same again.
Inspector Malin Fors is standing by her mother’s coffin at the Chapel of Resurrection, trying to provoke some kind of emotion. A muffled rumbling breaks the silence, and soon she is on her way to Filbyter Square and a sight she will never forget. Shards of glass. Crushed flowers and scattered vegetables. A ragged child’s shoe. A dove pecking at something red in the deafening silence.
Someone has appointed Kallentoft Sweden's new crime king. That is no exaggeration. Rolf Asmundsson, Östran
Mons Kallentoft is great. The relationships at the police station, the struggling interplay between Malin and the teenage daughter and the longing for love are coupled with the increasingly tense fight against evil. A real treat for those of you who enjoy suspense. Inger Lundqvist, Norra Västerbotten
In a lingering, suggestive prose, which has probably never worked better than here, human decay is described from several different aspects. Destinies, images and voices are intertwined to a whole and it's very rare that a Swedish crime author manages to do it as skilfully as Mons Kallentoft. Per Planhammar, GöteborgsPosten
The crime that is commited in "Savage Spring" does not only have a personal motive, there appears to be something here that concerns the universal, that might even stem from a kind of ancient, mythological evil. The kind that you find in Dante's "Inferno", the Greek myths, the heart of darkness itself. "Savage Spring" makes a good attempt to regenerate the crime novel's eternal message about doing the right thing, by posing the question of what "right" actually means. Kallentoft here tries to analyse the conception of evil within the bounds of the crime novel's strict rules, to a larger extent than he has previously done in the series. Elise Karlsson, Svenska Dagbladet
To Malin Fors the private life, even by her standards, is turbulent to say the least. At the same time as the bomb goes off she is standing by her mother's coffin. In addition Fors is a recent recovering alcoholic and a single mum of a teenager. Perhaps that sounds too heavy, but the fact is that she's never been more interesting than here. Maria Neij, Corren
In true Kallentoft spirit, "Savage Spring" is as much about Malin Fors's own hardships to stay sober, be a good mother, her longing for love and the troubled relationship to her parents, as it is about following Linköping's police force slowly untangling the motive behind the explosion and the deaths. Marita Johansen, Nerikes Allehanda
Mons Kallentoft has with his books created his own little crime universe somewhere between the realistic and the fantastical where he tells his story in a flowing poetic prose. Gunilla Wedding, Norra Skåne
ICE COLD, GROUNDBREAKING SUSPENSE.
It is the coldest February in recent memory. In the early hours of a particularly cold night, the body of an obese man is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of the withered, windswept plains of Östergötland.
The young superintendent Malin...
RUTHLESS GREED EXPLOITING THE MOST VULNERABLE: CHILDREN.
Spring is in the air in Linköping and things are looking up for Malin Fors. Though still haunted by the ghosts of her past and years of substance abuse and self-destruction, it seems she is finally on an even keel. Malin’s daughter Tove...
"HOW DID I END UP HERE?”
Malin Fors is unable to move. The forest still lies dark in the early September morning, there is a smell of fire in the air coming from an industrial estate on the outskirts of town and on the ground in front of her is the burnt...