Post Mortem

From the bestselling writer of The Girl in the Spider’s Web comes another mystery led by detective duo Rekke and Vargas: this time, their hunt for a serial killer has a literary twist.

It’s 1988. Dag and his friend Pompe are on a road trip through Europe. As they speed through French towns and Basque villages in Dag’s red BMW convertible, they party and discuss Celine, Hemingway, and Leonard Cohen. But when Pompe’s drinking gets more intense, a darker side emerges. In the Spanish port city of Santander, Pompe and Dag meet a young waitress, Sandra. She has dreams of becoming a writer and is smitten by the two intellectual Scandinavians, especially Pompe, who represents the literary lifestyle she longs for. Before Dag goes home to Sweden, he decides to tell Sandra what Pompe might be capable of…

Now it’s November 2008, back in Stockholm. We’re reintroduced to Professor Hans Rekke and his detective partner Micaela Vargas, who has a new boyfriend she hasn’t yet told Rekke about. They receive a surprise visit from a Spanish police chief inspector who is haunted by the unsolved, brutal murder of a young woman in Santander in the late ‘80s, and believes this case is connected to others. Could there be a serial killer on the loose, who leaves numerical codes on the bodies of his victims? Can Rekke help decipher these signs before the killer strikes again?

Post Mortem switches between these two timelines, taking us into the last day of Sandra’s life, and Rekke and Vargas’s search for clues, which lead them by turns to an egomaniac writer, a widely loathed literary agent, and ultimately to Sandra’s posthumously published short story. In yet another intricate and exciting puzzle mystery, David Lagercrantz draws on the literary world that he—and we—know all too well to tell a story about guilt, shame, repressed memories, human depravity, and publishing.