Published New York Times: January 5, 2011
THREE SECONDS
By Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom
Translated by Kari Dickson. 489 pages. Silver Oak. $24.95.
This is the sound of music, for those who publish mystery novels these days:
“He accelerated after Slussen, along Stadsgardskajen, then braked and turned off just before Danvikstull bridge and the municipal boundary with Nacka. Down Tegelviksgatan and then left into Alsnogatan to the barrier that blocked the only road up to Danviksberget.”
The passage is from “Three Seconds,” which is not the first book written by the odd-couple team of Anders Roslund (journalist) and Borge Hellstrom (ex-criminal). But “Three Seconds” is the first Roslund and Hellstrom book that has been wishfully packaged to suggest that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has a second cousin.
“Three Seconds” spent the better part of a year on Swedish best-seller lists. Its authors won a prize — the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award for Swedish Crime Novel of the Year — that has also been awarded to Larsson and Henning Mankell. They know how to deliver the kind of stilted, world-weary verbosity that somehow quickens the pulses of this genre’s readers. Even better, they are on a first-name basis with the Seven Dwarfs of Scandinavian Noir: Guilty, Moody, Broody, Mopey, Kinky, Dreary and Anything-but-Bashful.
Mr. Roslund and Mr. Hellstrom know better than to make “Three Seconds” short, no matter what kind of brevity its title describes. So this is a nearly 500-page book with a many-faceted plot, and the authors are in no hurry to bring their story into focus. They begin with a kind of party exhortation: “Eat, drink, and throw up.” Those are the instructions given to drug mules who have ingested small rubber parcels of amphetamines and have successfully transported them into Sweden from Poland.
Janet Maslin's full review here.
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