Sail of Stone
By Åke Edwardson


Åke Edwardson is a storyteller, a spinner of yarns, who develops his intriguing characters meticulously. His pace is slow but worth the read because his characters and psychological themes are intriguing. In Sail of Stone, Edwardson interweaves the study of family relations with both the characters of the mysteries and with the lives of the detectives.

A brother and sister report that their father has disappeared, and they believe he may have gone to Scotland in search of his father, who was presumed to have died in World War II. Chief inspector Erik Winter of the Gothenburg police is drawn into the investigation of the two missing persons because of a past personal relationship with the daughter of the missing man. He calls on the help of an old friend from Scotland Yard and they travel to Scotland.
His colleague Aneta Djanali, Gothenburg’s African-Swedish female detective, is pursuing a missing abused wife, whose family seems to be hiding her from the investigation. The investigation leads her and her colleague Fredrik Halder into a set of very baffling events that comes to a climatic conclusion.

I found the author’s practice of switching from case to case with very little information given, a bit jarring and annoying. There also, was bit too much irrelevant dialogue in the beginning, that drags the plot along rather than carrying it forward.

As slow as the beginning is, keep reading, because the twists and turns at the end are page-turners.