Still Waters

The first book in Swedish author Viveca Sten’s enormously popular Sandhamn Murders series.

On a hot July morning on Sweden’s idyllic vacation island of Sandhamn, a man takes his dog for a walk and makes a gruesome discovery: a body, tangled in fishing net, has washed ashore.

Police detective Thomas Andreasson is the first to arrive on the scene. Before long, he has identified the deceased as Krister Berggren, a bachelor from the mainland who has been missing for months. All signs point to an accident―until another brutalized corpse is found at the local bed-and-breakfast. But this time it is Berggren’s cousin, whom Thomas interviewed in Stockholm just days before.

As the island’s residents reel from the news, Thomas turns to his childhood friend, local lawyer Nora Linde. Together, they attempt to unravel the riddles left behind by these two mysterious outsiders―while trying to make sense of the difficult twists their own lives have taken since the shared summer days of their youth.

Swedish writer Viveca Sten has sold almost four million copies of her enormously popular Sandhamn Murders series. In 2014, her seventh novel, the hugely successful I maktens skugga (In the Shadow of Power), was published in Sweden and cemented her place as one of the country’s most popular authors. Her Sandhamn Murders novels continue to top the bestseller charts and have been made into a successful Swedish-language TV miniseries, which has been broadcast around the world to thirty million viewers. Sten lives in Stockholm with her husband and three children, but she prefers to spend her time visiting Sandhamn to write and vacation with her family.

Marlaine Delargy is based in Shropshire in the United Kingdom. She studied Swedish and German at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and taught German in comprehensive schools for almost twenty years. She has translated novels by authors including Åsa Larsson, Kristina Ohlsson, Helene Tursten, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Therese Bohman, Ninni Holmqvist, and Johan Theorin, with whom she won the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger for The Darkest Room in 2010.