Never End: A Chief Inspector Erik Winter Novel

I have read all the books by Ake Edwardson that have been translated and enjoyed every one of them. I recommend all of them.

Never End begins slowly. The reader struggles to make a coherent story from the details gathered by the detectives, who are also trying to make sense of confusing clues. As the story continues, however, the pace picks up. It left me breathless at the end. I love the Nordic style of Scandinavian authors.

This is a beautifully written, compelling book. I had a hard time putting it down. Ake Edwardson is an exciting, skillful writer.

Ake Edwardson in similar fashion to other Swedish crime novelists like the more famous Henning Mankell, chronicles a methodical homicide inquest while focusing in on both the psychological aspects of the suspects, victims and their police pursuers. In a sweltering summer heat wave in the coastal town of Gothenburg, a corpse of a young woman is found in a hollowed out area within a thicket of trees in a local park. Pathology reports have determined that she had been sexually violated and strangled. Chief Inspector Erik Winter, in charge of the investigation, is stunned as the crime is eerily similar to an unsolved rape and murder committed 5 years ago in the exact same location. Winter mobilizes his team to pore over the evidence but soon there is another young victim who was raped but survived. Her fragile psychological state provides few clues for Winter. Winter becomes obsessed with solving both the cold case of five years ago and the current crime wave. He is not without his misgivings as being a new father he's torn between sharing his time with his family and on the job. Edwardson's nicely paced novel chronicles the arduous, dispiriting measures that the police go through while dealing with their own personal conflicts. He rightly devotes a more than adequate effort in character developement which adds reality to his plot