Sun and Shadow [Paperback]

Ke Edwardson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2006

A couple entertain a stranger in their Gothenburg apartment, but his choice of death metal music isn't quite what they had in mind - this particular illicit rendezvous will be prove to be their last. For more than a week a newspaper boy has watched his deliveries piling up behind a front door. The loud music playing inside the apartment seems an odd choice for 5 a.m. and the boy becomes increasingly afraid. What greets Chief Inspector Erik Winter and his team when they arrive appears as a stage setting, grotesquely symbolic in its composition. While Inspector Winter trawls the classifieds in men's magazines in search of the missing third person from this sinister party, a trail from the clues left by the killer leads into the cult world of the gothic. A riddle of nightmares, of good versus evil, of sun and shadow. Chief Inspector Erik Winter puts his sharp intellect to work on the case. But he has other things on his mind: the murder has taken place very close to home, and his pregnant girlfriend is nervous. Now every shadow in the corridor adopts a sinister shape. Every silent phone call holds a particular menace. When the investigation unearths a possible link between the murders and the police force, even friendly faces are not to be trusted and, when the killer strikes again, Winter is in a race against time to protect both the city and his family from this threatening evil.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cars from Sweden are known for being dependable and safe, but like this American debut from a celebrated Scandinavian crime writer, their stolid lines don't necessarily spark excitement. Erik Winter, a jazz-loving, gourmet-cooking detective, is a blaze of color amid the drab postwar apartment blocks of Gothenburg, a city reeling from a macabre double murder. Winter, whose normally secure battlements are assaulted by family tragedy and the impending birth of his first child, sets out to follow the dark drops of gore blooming in the snow. The path leads in any number of interesting directions—through thickets of death metal enthusiasts and swingers, through winds of psychosexual trauma—but these subjects never pierce the book's colorless atmosphere. Excessive exposition slows down an already unhurried plot, which Americans fond of glib investigators on CSI and Hannibal Lecter's piercing irony will find insufficiently suspenseful. The villain is comparatively bland, and the translation often awkward: Winters takes a "softly softly approach" so that his witness doesn't get "chary." Add in an insistence on mundane details, such as the particulars of a simple bank transaction, and the results smother any flame of personality. All the blocks that built this gothic ice cathedral are cut straight, but assembled without the design of a compelling thriller.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Eric Winter, at 40, is Sweden's youngest chief inspector, but his brow is already starting to furrow in the manner of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander. In this American debut of what promises to be a superior procedural series, a plethora of seemingly insoluble problems contribute to Winter's sense of growing discontent: his father is dying in Spain; his pregnant girlfriend is moving into his apartment; and a bloody double murder suggests a serial killer. As in the Wallander series, the focus here lands not only on the hero but also on his entire team, as Edwardson details the slow grind of the investigative process. The action, beginning in fall 1999 and extending into spring 2000, effectively uses the Y2K panic to heighten the sense of troubled waters approaching that grips Winter and those around him. The comparison to Mankell is obvious, but in many ways, this series harkens further back, to Sjowall and Wahloo's early Martin Beck novels, in which another youngish Swedish inspector was beginning to realize that sometimes a crime's solution solves nothing. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books; New edition edition (June 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099472058
• ISBN-13: 978-0099472056
• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 1.3 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,555,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not trying to be Henning Mankell, November 6, 2006

By 

Jim Coughenour (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sun and Shadow: An Erik Winter Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

I'm rating this book 5 stars just to bring up the abysmal rating given by the only other reviewer so far; it deserves better. I'm an aficionado of Scandinavian detectives (see my manic list elsewhere). Edwardson's books are as enjoyable as any. "Never End" - the sequel to this book - is maybe richer, but "Sun and Shadow" serves as an excellent introduction to the icy world of Winter & company. The plot evolves in several dimensions and casts its own bleak spell. Connoisseurs of crime fiction won't want to miss it.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I read it in one night!, January 28, 2008

By 

Angela (Mechanicsville, MD, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sun and Shadow: An Erik Winter Novel (Paperback)

I am a very big fan of Scandinavian crime novels, being from Norway I guess that is a no-brainer.
While I have thoroughly enjoyed Mankells series, I was looking for something a bit more contemporary and edgier. I found it with Erik Winter. I think he breaths of fresh air into the genre. He's not an aging detective but a rising star in the force. He is smart and very complex, but also has a softer side when it comes to his family/personal life. Don't expect a Henning Mankell type novel. Both 'Erik Winter' books are very much worth reading and I recommend reading them in sequential order. I'm anxiously waiting for the third to come so I can pour me a glass of wine and have an evening with Mr. Winter.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Turmoil at the onset of the new millenium, April 6, 2007

By 

Cory D. Slipman (Rockville Centre, N.Y.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sun and Shadow: An Erik Winter Novel (Hardcover)

Ake Edwardson's "Sun and Shadow" is a worthy addition to the rapidly growing genre of Scandinavian crime dramas being translated for consumption for the English speaking market. Edwardson, however uses a slightly different formula. He devotes nearly one third of his novel developing both his characters, particularly protagonist, Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter and his setting, Gothenberg, Sweden. He gives us brief glimpses at the heinous crime that will become Winter's focus.

Gothenberg is at the onset of both Christmas and the celebration of the new millenium when a brutal double murder with obvious sexual overtones is uncovered. Inspector Winter whose life is in flux owing to the anticipation of fatherhood, had recently been jetting back and forth to the Costa del Sol in Spain. His father lying on his deathbed had succumbed to his illnesses. With personal issues cluttering his mind, he now must focus on coordinating the investigation of this killing.

We soon learn through the ongoing inquest that the murder seems in some way related to couples who fulfill their sexual fantasies by wife swapping. Eyewitnesses around the crime scene report that a man in uniform was seen around the time of the murders. Could Winter possibly be searching for one of his own?

Edwardson leads us through his plot at a leisurely pace not revealing too much but concluding is a frenetic fashion as time is of the essence, as the murderer is poised to strike again.