The Torso

“The scenes in which Huss tracks her killer through the underbelly of Copenhagen are as good as Louise Welsh’s similarly creepy tour of Glasgow in The Cutting Room.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[Tursten] is a master at setting the scene, detailing a foreign milieu until it feels familiar. She juggles a large cast of characters with aplomb.”—Time Out Chicago

“One of the better examples of the Swedish crime fiction invasion.”—Baltimore Sun

“Outstanding.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Spins a good story . . . this is a solid police procedural.”—Library Journal

Part of a human torso washes up on a beach near Göteborg, Sweden. It is so mutilated that gender is only established by DNA testing. A similar crime, now several years old, remains unsolved in Denmark. Detective Inspector Irene Huss is dispatched to Copenhagen to liaise with police. Then a third corpse is discovered. This time it’s identified. It is a girl Detective Huss knew; she had been asked by the girl’s mother to locate her missing daughter. A fourth victim, the son of a woman heading the Copenhagen crime squad, is also known to Huss. She fears the killer is tracking her, killing people with whom she is connected. There is even a chilling suggestion that he or she is one of her colleagues.

Helene Tursten has been compared to P.D. James in her native Sweden. Her Irene Huss mysteries have been highly praised. She lives in Göteborg, where she was born in 1954.