THE MIRROR MAN

Swedish detective Joona Linna is back to investigate the abductions, killings, and dismembering of teenage girls by a serial killer called Caesar.

Five years after her much-publicized abduction at age 16, Jenny Lind is found gruesomely hung to death on a public playground. Martin, a mentally frail local man, may have witnessed the crime while walking his dog, but personal traumas have left him too shaky to remember anything. Also five years ago, during an ice-fishing outing with his 16-year-old daughter, Alice, Martin survived a fall through the ice but Alice was never found. He also lost his entire family in a car accident when he was a boy and has been tormented by punishing visions of his dead brothers ever since. With Martin in and out of a psychiatric facility, his wife, Pamela, decides to adopt Mia, a troubled 17-year-old. Soon enough, Mia will be abducted by Caesar and his tattooed henchwoman, Granny, who likes to jab her girls with a knockout drug—and saw the feet off of those who try to escape. Psychiatrist Erik Maria Bark, a regular in Kepler's Killer Instinct series (of which this is the eighth installment, following Lazarus, 2018), has some tantalizing results hypnotizing Martin to get him to remember what he saw at the playground. Though the early sections of this longish thriller are tantalizing—toying with the reader with a major red herring—the book jumps the tracks with a burst of forced twists and turns and an ultraviolent, head-shaking climax.

A page-turner until it isn't, Kepler's latest becomes a case of too much too late.