{"id":3634,"date":"2021-01-06T13:29:07","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T19:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/?p=3634"},"modified":"2021-01-06T13:30:44","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T19:30:44","slug":"death-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/2021\/01\/06\/death-angels\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Angels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ake Edwardson, 1997<\/h2>\n

translated by Ken Schubert, 2009<\/h4>\n

Penguin Books<\/h4>\n

\"Death
\n\u201cWhatever direction he took, menace was his journey and his destination. He was alone, and he had no faith in anything.\u201d This sentence from the middle of Death Angels<\/em> describes Chief Inspector Erik Winter\u2019s state of mind as he seeks to solve two horrific murders of young men, one in London and the other in Winter\u2019s hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden. It\u2019s commonplace to describe Nordic crime fiction is \u201cdark,\u201d and you can tell by this sentence that Death Angels<\/em>, the first of ten Erik Winter novels, is no exception.<\/p>\n

Outwardly, Winter has it figured out. He is the youngest Chief Inspector in Sweden. Successful, handsome and wealthy, he has refined taste in food, jazz, clothing, and scotch whiskey. He is attractive to women and enjoys their company. Inwardly, the nature of his work\u2014solving murders\u2014means that he is haunted by vivid images of crime scenes, anguished by the experience of other people\u2019s pain, and numbed by the presence of evil everywhere he looks. In the closing scene of Death Angels<\/em>, when you think he might be sipping a dram of Lagavulin and taking satisfaction from having solved the murders with which the novel opens, instead he\u2019s in Vasaplatsen Park in Gothenburg with his head in the lap of a Pastor who consults with the Police Department. \u201cHow are you doing, Erik?\u201d she asks. \u201cI\u2019m making it. Tomorrow\u2019s another day and all that.\u201d The happiest note they achieve at the end of their conversation is that \u201cit\u2019s getting warmer day by day.\u201d This put me in mind of the closing sentence of Jar City<\/em> by the Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason. It\u2019s the most positive thing that happens in the novel:\u00a0 \u201cIt stopped raining.\u201d<\/p>\n

Death Angels<\/em> is a spare novel. Think of the clean lines of Scandinavian furniture. A German reviewer called it \u201cA fast, sleek, hard ballad.\u201d That\u2019s an apt description. Don\u2019t go to this novel for rich illumination of the inner life of its characters. Go to it for a detective determined to root out evil and willing to bear the cost to himself of that work.<\/p>\n

Back to the Bookshelf<\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ake Edwardson, 1997 translated by Ken Schubert, 2009 Penguin Books \u201cWhatever direction he took, menace was his journey and his destination. He was alone, and he had no faith in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1133,"featured_media":3636,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pdas-bookshelf"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/files\/2021\/01\/DeathAngels_feat.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3637,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634\/revisions\/3637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}