Rekke Series

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.

David Lagercrantz’s detective duo, Rekke and Vargas, returns in a new installment of the internationally best-selling series that began with Dark Music (“A classic mystery . . . One Holmes himself would have loved to solve” —The Independent).

Dead women should not show up in photos fourteen years beyond the grave . . . But if anyone is likely to recognize Claire Lidman, it’s her husband, Samuel. He brings the photo to Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Their initial skepticism gives way to cautious belief—but where will this case lead them?

Meanwhile, Rekke’s daughter, Julia, has a new boyfriend she’s determined to keep secret. When word gets out, Micaela’s world collapses around her, and Rekke is forced to confront a nemesis from his youth.

Plunging us back into the political upheaval and financial crisis of the 1990s, as the Iron Curtain is finally lifted, the second Rekke and Vargas investigation sees our heroes grapple with a fiendish case that affects them both in profoundly personal ways.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, an exhilarating new thriller from the best-selling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web—a murder investigation in which two unlikely allies race to uncover a shadowy international conspiracy.

Professor Hans Rekke is a world authority on interrogation techniques, capable of dizzying feats of logic and observation. He was born into wealth and power and has a picture-perfect wife and daughter. But he also has a fragile psyche that falls apart under pressure.

Micaela Vargas is a street-smart police officer, the daughter of Chilean political refugees, who grew up in the projects on the outskirts of Stockholm and has two brothers on the wrong side of the law. She is tenacious and uncompromising, and desperate to prove herself to her fellow cops.

Micaela needs Hans’s unique mind to help her solve the case of a murdered asylum-seeker from Afghanistan. Hans needs Micaela to save him from himself. Together, they need to find the killer before they’re both silenced for good.