** spoiler alert ** Sweden, what is going on there? On one hand, this is a pretty good book. Joona Linna is everything you want in a police inspector - ruggedly good-looking, arrogant yet polite, and always right (my favorite line? "I'm not usually wrong and I believe we're going to find your son." Tell me, Joona, do you ever tell someone, "I'm not usually wrong & I think your son is long gone"?). The story is genuinely creepy - when Simone is awakened in the night by someone giving her an injection & she stumbles down the hall hearing someone cooing & laughing in her son's room? I had to get up & make sure the doors and windows were locked. The chapters are short & sweet & this makes it hard to put the book down; I stayed up late two nights in a row to finish it.

On the other hand, though, this book is total rubbish. Eric Maria Bark! Your son has been kidnapped! Can you think of any enemies you might have? Why, no way, everyone loves me! . . . . Oh wait, there was that therapy group of psychotic crazy people that I was doing hypnotic experiments on. And that one crazy lady who kept being sexually inapproprite in my office & and who broke into my house & stole a picture of my son. And that other crazy lady who kept a little boy locked in a cage in her basement & tried to kill herself in front of me & later sued me, saying that I drove her mad with hypnosis. Does that count? Really? It seriously took you over half the book to remember this stuff?
There are too many red herrings & too many characters who are kind of meaningless & too many plot lines - I literally forgot about the serial killer 15-year-old & when he showed up 100+ pages later getting all stabby, I was surprised we were still talking about him. Some poor artist guy seems to exist only to do it with Simone & then get killed. And although I would be absolutely overjoyed if an actual MD would dispute this, I am pretty sure there exists no drug that can bring someone out of a comatose state long enough to answer questions about who made that mysterious cell phone call & then boom, back into the coma you go! Most importatly, parents of young children beware - there's an awful lot of kidnapping & child abuse & that all made me sort of sick to my stomach.