Post Mortem: The third novel in a gripping Scandi crime series inspried by Sherlock Holmes

by David Lagercrantz

Professor Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas have earned a reputation for solving the unsolvable. But they've never been confronted by a serial killer.

That changes when Rekke receives a visit from Spanish chief inspector Rafael Corales, who is unable to forget the unsolved murder of a young woman in Santander in 1988. Now other bodies have come to light, marked with signs that seem to be some kind of numerical order.

Still recovering from his latest hypomanic episode - his relationship with Vargas strained by a secret she's keeping - Rekke agrees to help track down the killer.

Clues from a posthumously published short story by Samantha draw him undercover into the murky world of Sweden's literary scene - authors, agents and producers who are past masters at selling a lie. To unmask the killer, Rekke must relearn the difference between fact and fiction, and discover what really happened that night in Santander in 1988.

Translated from the Swedish by Ian Giles

Kindle Edition

Expected publication August 27, 2026

About the author

David Lagercrantz, born in 1962, is a journalist and author, living in Stockholm. His first book was published in 1997, a biography of the Swedish adventurer and mountaineer Göran Kropp. In 2000 his biography on the inventor Håkan Lans, A Swedish Genious, was published. His breakthrough as a novelist was Fall of Man in Wilmslow, a fictionalised novel about the British mathematician Alan Turing. In David Lagercrantz' writing you can often see a pattern: major talents who refuse to follow convention. He has been interested not only in what it takes to stand out from the crowd, but also in the resistance that such creativity inevitably faces.

In 2011 his best-selling sports biography I am Zlatan Ibrahimović was published, one of the most successful books in Sweden in modern times. The biography was nominated for the prestigious August Prize in 2012, as well as shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. To date, the book has been published in over 30 languages around the world and been sold in millions of copies.

In the summer of 2013, Lagercrantz was asked by Moggliden (the Larsson Estate) and Norstedts to write the fourth, free-standing sequel to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. The Girl in the Spider's Web was published – in August 27, 2015 – simultaneously by 26 publishers (in 24 languages) worldwide, ten years after the Swedish publication of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Stieg Larsson's three Millennium novels have sold more than 82 Million copies to date, by 52 publishers worldwide. The Girl in the Spider's Web is sold to 47 publishers and more than 6 Million copies have been sold worldwide.