NIGHT ROUNDS

The most likely suspect in the strangling of a young Swedish night nurse seems to be the hospital ghost.

Nurse Siv Persson knows what she saw shortly after a sudden power outage left banker Nils Peterzén dead in the ICU unit of Löwander Hospital, and what she saw was the easily recognizable figure of Tekla Olsson in her nurse’s uniform. The only thing that prevents Criminal Inspector Irene Huss, of Göteborg’s Violent Crime Unit, from arresting Nurse Tekla is that she’s been dead since her 1947 suicide, a year after she was dismissed by the founding father of Dr. Sverker Löwander, the Surgical Chief of Medicine. When the police follow Löwander to the body of Marianne Svärd, a nurse who was very much alive until a short time ago, they have no way of knowing that the carnage is just beginning. Two more inconvenient witnesses will soon die, leaving Huss (The Torso, 2006, etc.) and her squad to puzzle out just how the long-dead Nurse Tekla could have been on the scene—or who was pretending to be her. Peterzén’s regal widow Doris, an attractive former model? The surgeon’s second wife, fitness instructor Carina Löwander? A crazy homeless informant calling herself Mama Bird? Dr. Niklas Alexandersson, an ex–drag queen now shacked up with the former husband of a missing Löwander nurse? The investigation into the hospital’s past may unearth routine secrets, but the killer is well worth unmasking, and Huss’ home life, trying as ever (one of her twin daughters has become a militant vegetarian), is a welcome bonus.