Discover: Scandinavian Murder Mysteries

Phantom feels like the final chapter of Nesbo's Harry Hole series, which is too bad, because Harry is pretty hot stuff. More psychological and less gory than Nesbo's previous books, Phantom is heartbreaking and pulse-quickening in equal measure. Hole is a recovering alcoholic perpetually falling off the wagon, handsome and difficult — a nice girl's bad boy. The star and scourge of Oslo's corruption-riddled police department, Hole has built his reputation on... catching serial killers. At the conclusion of the previous novel, the terrifying The Snowman, Hole fled Oslo for Hong Kong, hoping to give his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Rakel, and her troubled son ,Oleg, a chance at a normal life. Now Oleg is a teenage junkie who has possibly murdered his best friend in a drug deal gone sour. When Hole comes home to save Oleg, he finds the usual complications: the Russian mafia, tempting society ladies, and his own demons.

Only in Sweden could a writer connect Hansel and Gretel with reality TV and come up with something more fun than either alone. Cutting between the mystery of two lost children and the murder of the heavy-partying reality show star Barbie, the novel follows detective Patrik Hedstrom, who has to find a killer whose motives could be anything from revenge to jealousy to panic. Set in the affluent tourist town of Fjällbacka,... his search takes him through Sweden even as his fiancée, Erica, plans their long-delayed nuptials and cares for their toddler daughter. In one of the more hilariously practical subplots, Erica searches for a wedding dress to suit her postpartum body, deciding that she and Patrik need to eat fewer buns (in every one of these books, the characters constantly eat sticky buns; it's very distracting). The Stranger's conclusion is both creepily satisfying and sentimental.

Every culture has its own particular social issues. In historically homogenous Sweden, immigration rights and the plight of refugees are particularly current concerns. Silenced plays on this obsession, contrasting the story of a murdered liberal minister who hid illegals in his country home with that of his daughters, who have each had their lives and safety changed by their father's activities. Fredrika Bergman, heavily pregnant by her married boyfriend, a former concert... violinist, is one of the primary detectives on the case. As the bodies pile up and the moral questions multiply, Fredrika and the other members of her team struggle to find the truth. Ohlsson's characters are as strong as her plot twists, making Silenced particularly satisfying.

Set in Copenhagen and Budapest, Invisible Murder is another book about the immigration issue. Nurse Nina Borg helps illegal immigrants who have fallen between the cracks of Sweden's refugee "problem." One night she is called to tend to a sick child in a hideaway on the far outskirts of town. Of course, the first child is only the beginning, and soon Nina risks her marriage, her already tenuous relationship with her teenage... daughter, and her professional status to help them. Meanwhile, a crew of homegrown criminals meets up with Tomas, a Hungarian Roma teenager. The fall of the Soviet Union has left him with some shady opportunities, and now he's trying to get that big score, the one that will pull his family out of poverty. When he steals his brother Sandor's passport, things start to go horribly wrong, as mistaken identities compound and more hidden Roma fall ill. Invisible Murder's plotting can be overly complicated, but the characters and detail pull the reader along.

The members of Stockholm's police department have learned to both appreciate and ignore detective Ewert Grens. Morose, phlegmatic, obsessed with the singer Siw Malmkvist (Sweden's answer to Connie Francis), Ewert's emotional clock stopped the day he ran over his young wife's head with his car. Since then, he's become an excellent detective, but an intractable bastard, compulsively visiting his brain-damaged sweetheart at her convalescent home, defying criminals and prosecutors in equal measure.... Cell 8 is the third in the Grens series, and as in the others, the authors expand his purview to political and moral questions beyond Sweden's borders.

John Schwartz's case initially attracts Grens's attention because it involves a head injury — Schwartz, a musician, attacked a man whom he saw molesting a young woman on the dance floor. Soon, Schwartz's true identity becomes known: He was on death row in a U.S. prison and somehow escaped. Rostlund and Hellstrom present an interesting dilemma: Grens and his team must square their abhorrence of America's criminal justice system with their duties as sworn officers of the law.