Really, I'd give this between a 3 and a 3.5 rating, not quite a 4. CAN WE GET SOME 1/2 star ratings, please??????????

The action begins in a hospital in the middle of a complete power outage, where the night nurse is on the way back to her station after helping the doctor on call with a patient whose alarm has gone off in the darkness. Sadly, the lack of power to the patient's respirator leads to his death. Technically the ICU nurse should have taken charge, but she seems to have gone missing. Looking through the window of the ward door, in the available moonlight, the night nurse sees a woman dressed in an old nurse's uniform, and recognizes her as the ghost of Nurse Tekla, who hanged herself in the attic some fifty years earlier and has supposedly haunted the hall ever since. When the police and emergency services are called, a horrifying discovery is made: the missing nurse is lying dead in the electrical room, the victim of human, rather than spectral hands. As the investigation gets rolling, another nurse goes missing. Are the two events connected? Where is the missing nurse? And what, if anything, does a suicide fifty years earlier have to do with this crime? When the Violent Crimes Division gets down to work, Irene Huss ultimately realizes that there are many interconnected and complicated relationships involving people in and around the hospital, and that sorting through all of them to get to the solution to current events may require an investigation into the past.

There are some good qualities that are brought out in Tursten's writing here. First there is the balance between Irene's home and work life; having two teenaged daughters is not easy for any mom, let alone a mom whose job takes center stage. This time she must deal with one of the twins who goodheartedly takes on the cause of animal rights, only to discover that she's fallen in with a crowd that prefers violence as their method of communication. There is also the author's focus on issues she obviously feels are important scattered throughout the novel: the ongoing sexual harassment issue at the police station, the perception towards immigrants, and a bit about the problems of the homeless and the mentally ill. As in the previous novel, Tursten brings these issues to the fore without dwelling on them for any length of time that is not appropriate to the story, so the reader never gets the feeling that she's being preachy. Finally, the whole ghost thing was a good hook to draw the reader in, whet his or her appetite and then get on with the story.

There is, however, one very glaring flaw (imho) in this story, and it has to do with a key piece of evidence that the police had all along that is obviously ignored or glossed over at the time it's presented to the team. The detectives did not act on it until much later, even though the reader knows it must be important. Had Huss and her team been as quick to jump on it as they did with other evidence in their possession, they probably could have progressed much further in the case sooner than they did. This time I figured out much of the story early on, but then again, watching how the police unravel this complicated plot in an intelligent manner is why I read these books anyway.

I liked this book, although truth be told, probably not as much as the first book in the series, which is a bit unusual for me. So far, I'm liking this series, and I'm really bummed that I'm gearing up to read The Torso and will have to figure out what I missed in the hole between that book and The Glass Devil by the time I get to it. I hope this series does well in translation so that the other books will be published as well. I can definitely recommend Night Rounds to readers of Scandinavian crime fiction, police procedurals and crime fiction in general.