THE GOLDEN CALF

A fourth round of multiple homicides-cum–lesser felonies for DI Irene Huss and her colleagues and friends in Göteborg’s Violent Crime Division (Night Rounds, 2012, etc.).

Even Irene’s husband, chef Krister Huss, knows who Kjell B:son [sic] Ceder is—the restaurant king of Göteborg—or was, until two well-placed bullets ended his life, leaving behind a widow who is alternately dry-eyed and hysterical and an unholy mess of domestic and financial double-dealing. Both Kjell and his much younger wife, Sanna Kaegler-Ceder, had carried on so many affairs that one mystery is why they ever got married. A second is whether Kjell’s first wife, a shipping heiress killed in a sailing accident, was really a victim of foul play. The meatiest mystery of all concerns Sanna’s Internet startup, ph.com, a brash high-end apparel retailer that had gone belly up in the dot-com crash of 2003. A closer look shows that ph.com was doomed from the first by both a highly unrealistic business model and the likelihood that at least one of its partners was emptying the till. Sanna’s friend, financial consultant Joachim Rothstaahl, is soon shot as dead as her husband. So is her ex-partner Philip Bergman. Is it possible that Thomas Bonetti, the third founding partner, who’s been missing since 2000, is behind the rash of embezzlement and murder? Has he been dead all along, the first casualty in a brutal housecleaning? And which member of this interlocking directorate is the father of Sanna’s infant son? Interrogating the diminishing pool of suspects and focusing on the enigmatic Sanna provokes many revelations. But only a visit from an Amazonian FBI agent will dispel the last shadows.

Monstrous Sanna is well worth Irene’s trouble, but the kitchen-sink financial intrigue and deus ex machina windup may tax fans’ patience.