Ah, but Mum, who turns up in London, having fled, may not be loony at all. A frantic email (“Nothing else, just my name, an exclamation mark”) alerts Daniel to the fact that something is rotten across the North Sea, where Mum has been parked in a hospital while Dad mutters worriedly about her declining mental faculties. Smith, who has family ties to Sweden, works a customarily Nordic twist, too, by setting family members at one another’s throats-and quite unnicely, too. The change of scene puts Smith squarely atop territory claimed by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and other masters of Scandinavian mayhem. Mama’s gone crazy, daddy’s gone crazy, and Smith ( Child 44, 2008) has skipped over from Stalin’s Russia to the idyllic Swedish countryside for his latest thriller.
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