The Hidden Child (Patrick Hedstrom and Erica Falck)
Long troubled by her late mother&#x2019;s coldness toward her two daughters, writer Erica Falck begins to read her mother, Elsy&#x2019;s, teenage diaries. She also discovers a Nazi war medal with the diaries and asks a retired history teacher to examine it. Within days, the teacher is bludgeoned to death. Then Britta, Elsy&#x2019;s closest friend as a teenager, who is suffering from Alzheimer&#x2019;s, is also murdered. Through the diaries, Erica intuits that the solution to the mystery is rooted in events that took place during WWII. Once again, L&#xE4;ckberg (The Stonecutter, 2012) employs Swedish history and her setting, Fjallbacka, the postcard-pretty village where Falck grew up, to craft an engaging tale that spans three generations of Fjallbackians. The author goes deep into the lives of a very large cast of characters, and some crime lovers might balk at a 520-plus&#x2013;page novel that is almost half family saga. But taken as a whole, The Hidden Child will keep fans of Swedish crime guessing until the final pages. --Thomas Gaughan--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.