Why a Booktrail?
2000s: The second installment of the Erik Winter series
The Shadow Woman
What you need to know before your trail
It’s August and the annual Gothenburg Party is in full swing. But this year the bacchanalian blowout is simmering with ethnic discord spurred by nativist gangs. When a woman is found murdered in the park-her identity as inscrutable as the blood-red symbol on the tree above her body-Winter’s search for her missing child leads him from sleek McMansions to the Gothenburg fringes, where “northern suburbs” is code for “outsider” and the past is inescapable-even for Sweden’s youngest chief inspector.
Travel Guide
Booktrail travel (on a motorbike) around Gothenburg
Erik Winter’s home and stomping ground. Most of his novels are largely based here although some do head out to different parts of the world on his many assignments.
In this novel, the author takes the backdrop of the Biker War in Sweden in the mid-1990as the inspiration.
Gothenburg is a fine city for a cop like Winter. It’s the perfect background for Ake as well since he’s worked at Gothenburg University as a professor, as a journalist and as a press officer for the United Nations. Plenty of issues and complex situations to merge into fiction!
“It’s often been shown that the choice of location is not random. A murderer selects his spot.”
“I agree with you. I think.”
“We have to ask ourselves why she was put there. Why she was lying at Delsjö Lake. Then, why at that particular end of the lake–”
“Proximity to the road,” Beier interjected.
“Maybe. Then we have to ask ourselves why she was lying exactly in that spot. Not five yards this way or that.”
“You really go in for the mise-en-scène.”
“The mise-en-scène involves movement; it’s the opposite of standing still.”
“That was beautifully put,” Beier said.
Gothenburg was founded as a heavily fortified, primarily Dutch, trading colony, by royal charter in 1621 and is now the largest port in the Nordic countries. There’s also a large student population which feature many times in the novels Gothenburg and the many verdant parks (although not for nice reasons in the books!)
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Shadow Woman
Destination: Gothenburg Author/Guide: Ake Edwardson Departure Time: 2000s
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
