Customer Reviews

Never End (Chief Inspector Erik Winter Novels)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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

Erik Winter is normally a fabulous dresser. But in the sweltering heat of a record hot summer in Gothenburg, the handsome chief inspector has exchanged his designer clothes for shorts and sandals. And he gives himself a further challenge by trying to quit smoking.

Drenched in sweat and nearly insane from nicotine withdrawal, Winter is not in great shape to find a serial killer.

A rape and a murder take place on after another in the same secluded spot in Slottsskogan Park. The sinister atmosphere of the crime scene is almost palpable to the reader, and to Winter, who's convinced that the killer returns here obsessively again and again.

Certain details in the killer's MO inspire Winter to check the files on a previous unsolved murder. Sure enough, there are grim similarities. Files and reports play an important role in this story. The truth, Winter feels certain, is buried somewhere in the reams of paperwork generated by police work.

As Winter and his team investigate, their various defeats and triumphs only seem to complicate the mystery. Interviewers come up against what feels like a wall of secrecy. The solution of the crime is hard won.

The private lives of Winter and his detectives offer satisfying subplots. I especially enjoyed the almost-love relationship between two of the detectives.

I always seem to experience confusion at some point in an Åke Edwardson novel. The author gets too tricky for me. This time it happened around the end. But I've decided that a little confusion doesn't matter much in a book that engrosses me as successfully the Erik Winter mysteries do.

Never End may not be perfect, but it's quite a good police procedural. I recommend it to fans of Swedish noir.

After reading the first two blockbusting Steig Larsson books I went in search of anything similar. One of the reviews on the back of Never End said the last 50 pages was the most incredible ever mystery writing blah blah, so I bought it. Let me say that there is no comparison to the phenomenal Larsson books that have taken the world by storm. This book is not in that league but is worth the read. It is a good, dark and sexually creepy mystery.

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.

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

Book2 in the Erik Winter series (English version)

We were initially introduced to Chief Inspector Erik Winter in "SUN AND SHADOW" a turn of the century mystery. Those who have an affinity toward police procedurals and soft suspense should enjoy this one.

This sequel brings us a few years later in Erik's life; he is now a father to a daughter and living with his partner in a cramped apartment and is desperately looking for better accommodations to ease the growing family tension. The temperature is not helping; Gothenburg Sweden is sweltering under an unusually hot summer.

On his professional side, Erik never loses focus on his responsibilities; fighting crime is his passion and he has developed a reputation to go with it. When an unusual number of rapes and murders cast a disturbing shadow on the city, Erik teams up with his investigators to gather the scant and the grisly details. Immediately he sees some similarities to a five year old cold case that is continually burning in the back of his mind. Up until now Erik's instincts have lead him to a multitude of dead ends to a point he started to doubt himself.....New events trigger a whole new approach to the ongoing mysteries.....

As the investigators aggressively hunt for new leads and rehash the old information the plotting has a tendency to bog down a little, I am sure this is reality for every good investigator but if overdone in print it can be a deterrent to the readers' enthusiasm. Buried in the chapters are clues to who has actually committed the crimes but at one point with all the red herrings confusion set in and I am still wondering whether I arrived at the right conclusion or am I being set up for a sequel? The lethargic sensation one suffers during a heat wave was expertly conveyed through the slow pacing and the characterization, no wonder Erik traded in his donuts for ice cream all the time, I felt the same way...:)

"Never End" is a gritty and stylish crime novel I enjoyed, I have the sequel on my list to read, however it is not one of my all-time favourites.

There are a series of rape/murders taking place in a city park over a period of time. Is there one killer? Are there two? Or more? This tangled web will come unraveled due to the diligence (sometimes hair pulling) of Chief Inspector Eric Winter (an interesting chap, quite cool until the end when even his even temperament breaks due to ultra-extreme frustration), and Detective Inspector Fredrik Halders (throughout the book dealing with a great tragedy of his own). The characters are all interesting and quite finely drawn.

I like the writing style. Sometimes if even drifts into a stream of consciousness motif, then pulls back into direct narrative. There is an innovative use of words - colloquial at times.

I did not find the ending (those last crucial 50 pages) greatly suspenseful. Interesting, yes, but I was not sitting on the edge of my seat. It may be the difference in a whodunit between major or minor character(s) being the villains. In a book with a lot of suspects fleeting through, one sometimes has to flip the pages back to make sure the one being referred to is correctly pinpointed and remembered.

Nevertheless, Ake Edwardson is a master of creating atmosphere and setting, and razor sharp describing his characters. Perhaps a tighter plot with more of a surprise ending would have been the icing on the cake. Still, it's a solid offering and I will be reading another Eric Winter novel now that more are available in translation.

I am compelled to offer a rare review, because I was sadly misled by the Amazon rating of five stars. No serious reader of crime fiction--particularly the excellent Swedish work of Mankel and Larsson alluded to by the previous reviewers--would find this book readable.

Where to start? First, with CDI Winter. He is notably a sophisticate, dressed in Versace, who mostly seems incompetent as a detective. He is led to the solution by a grueling (to the reader) sequence of false or blind steps, involving no serious detecting. He leaves the interrogation to a specialist who unearths nothing at all. When he deigns to question a witness himself, Winter usually confronts an obvious lie by asking, "Why are you lying," engendering the predictable response, "I'm not," whereupon he drops the subject invariably! The prime witness is never pressed on her lie--a blunder which caused much delay and a near death. Winter's as bad a detective as Wallendar or Rebus are good.

The writing is simply dreadful. The chapters are often a jumble of sections unrelated in time or theme, and their division is puzzling (one chapter ended mid-scene and the next finished it). The colloquy is pedestrian: many pages contained only sequences of one- or two-line paragraphs, including 21 "Eh?"s. The interrogations usually went nowhere, and the colloquy often was nothing but short back-and-forth nonsense. The author seems unfamiliar with the usefulness of antecedents, leaving us to wonder who or what is being described. The vast majority of sentences begin with the subject followed immediately by verb and a short race to the full stop. The character of Winter and others is revealed not by what they say or do, but by their thoughts alone, in an unfamiliar style forcing the reader into the mind itself.

The translation was often strange, or even silly (roadsigns in miles). I once nearly snapped my Kindle in two, when a Swedish temperature sign was said to read "102"!

Indeed, the overriding and oppressive theme was a record heat wave, which at one point brought a thunderstorm overhead from the distant horizon in seconds. The weather was everywhere, generating wind and rain, a cacophony of odors, and hot weather apparel, but absolutely nothing to do with the crimes or their investigations.

Frankly, I think the only use for the book is as a text demonstrating over and over nearly every mistake one could make in mystery writing.

I must agree with Whitney (see the review) about this book. A great deal must have been lost in transation. Some phrases were used over and over and over. The dialog mostly consisted of two or three word sentences, and went ON for PAGE AFTER PAGE AFTER PAGE. I cannot recommend this book to anyone, I read about one third of the book before I finally gave up. And reiteration was rampant, adding nothing to the book. It culd have been whittled down to half as many pages with no loss of the story (assuming there was a story). Horrible! I have read a couple of his previous books but he is far from one of my favorite authors.