Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

Short Books
Swedish sex god seduces librarian?
In a sense. Benny and Shrimp is the story of an unlikely love. It came out in Sweden in 1998 and became a mass seller, then when it was published in the US it took off there. Now it’s about to explode here.
A love fated to be?
Pretty unlikely, really. In the graveyard, Desirée is gazing sadly and resentfully at her husband’s starkly designed grave while Benny tends his parents’ over-the-top grave of frills and marble and plastic flowers, and they dislike each other on sight. Then they smile at each other, and Zowee!
But…?
Ah yes. Benny is a dairy farmer crushed by a 16-hour day tending cows, clearing manure, fixing tractors, doing accounts, paying the vet, working in the forest, with no one to help. Desirée, or Shrimp as he nicknames her, is a serious intellectual with a career in the library.
So he needs a different kind of woman?
And she needs a different kind of man. Benny needs a sonsy farmgirl who knows how to make meatballs with lingonberry sauce from berries she’s gathered herself, and keep the farmhouse trim, and back the tractor and baler while he’s loading. Desirée needs a Lacan-discussing cafe lizard.
But then how…?
One smile, and next thing she’s fondling his blond curls and they’re having wild experimental sex all over the place. He buys her birthday presents - butterfly-shaped soap, a mouth organ, silly earrings, mauve tights -
Wait! Wait! What was that about sex?
Oh, lots of sex. Funny sex too, better still. And the story! A real page-turner, with nice subplots as well - one of the librarians keeps files and photos on colleagues; a friend loves a bad man who does her wrong.
But a happy ending?
The weirdest ending you could imagine, and morally equivocal, to say the least. But I won’t spoil it for you. Go and buy it pronto. It’s wonderful.
Author page for Penguin (Mazetti's US publisher)

The Preacher by Camilla Lackberg

HarperCollins €20.24
CRIME passes down through families. A couple of youngsters turn up in court, then a few years later it’s their children.
By the time the prosecuting gardai are old and grizzled, it’s their grandchildren.
Swedish thriller writer Camilla Lackberg’s new murder feast is about a family steeped in crime.
The grandfather, Ephraim, was a simple con man. Posing as a preacher he brought his two beautiful little boys around to cure the sick.
But the ‘sick’ were people he’d bribed to pose as terminally ill patients so they could be miraculously healed.
The criminal family is so complicated that we could have done with a family tree. Two of Ephraim’s grandsons are the local burglars, and blackmail is rife within the clan.
Years after Ephraim became respectable (on inheriting money from a grateful parishioner), three bodies turn up in the village where the family lives.
One is fresh and bloody. It’s lying on the bones of two earlier murder victims - two girls who disappeared 20 years ago.
The local small-town cops start to investigate. Then another girl goes missing.
Lackberg has a sweet subplot about a shy officer finding romance. And some funny stuff about sedulously ass-kissing officers, and bone-selfish families.
Anyone who loves Scandinavian crime fiction will enjoy this laid-back thriller by the author of The Ice Princess.
Writer's site

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Maclehose

MUST stop reading must stop reading just another page must stop reading.
It's one of those books - but not for the first third, which is slow and awkwardly written.
Read the first few pages to get the characters in your head, then skip to a third in, when our hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is investigating the long-ago disappearance of the heir to an industrial empire.
Stieg Larsson, who wrote The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was Sweden's best and bravest investigative journalist, the bane of racist and neo-Nazi organisations and a world authority on them.
His life was lived under constant death threats.
After his work in journalism, he settled down at night to write thrillers. He wrote a series of three - this is the first; the other two will appear in translation next year and 2010.
He gave the manuscripts to a publisher, and then died of a massive heart attack at the age of 50.
The books, published posthumously, were a million-selling sensation in Sweden, and this first of the series is now taking off worldwide, after being chosen by Oprah.
The story: journalist Mikael Blomkvist, convicted of libel for a story about a dodgy tycoon, is hired by the aged head of the Vanger family to investigate the disappearance of his granddaughter in the 1960s.
Working on the Vangers' desolate island home, Blomkvist is helped by a hacker, Lisbeth Salander, a damaged kid under the 'care' of the State. They discover that there's more to the Vangers than a family business.
There they become the hunted, with very dangerous people on their trail, ready to kill and maim to shut them up.
Apart from being a tense, horrifying thriller that will have your eyes standing out from your head and your mouth hanging open as you read, it's a guide to investigative reporting.

The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg

HarperCollins

IN AN ice-crusted bathtub, her lips blue, lies the Ice Princess - Alex, the beauty of the fishing town of Fjallbacka, her wrists slit.
The handyman who finds her body rushes straight to the nearest neighbour, professional writer Erica, to phone the police.
So far, so unremarkable. But Camilla Lackberg's story is more than a police procedural.
It's odd to find such warm-hearted, ordinary characters in a thriller as we have here. Everyone is human, in their kindness or unkindness or even psychopathy in one case
Erica was once Alex's best friend, and now she decides to write Alex's story. She - and the shy policeman who has always fancied Erica - discover that Alex had secret contacts all over the town.
One is a brilliant painter, a wino, son of the woman who cleans house for the aristocracy of the town of Fjallbacka. He is the obvious suspect for the murder. Until he turns up dead himself.
Meanwhile Erica's love life is taking comic and sweet turns - but I won't spoil it by saying how.
I couldn't put this book down, and at some points in the bank holiday weekend was rushing helplessly between the compost I was riddling and The Ice Princess, unable to abandon either.
Brilliantly plotted, this is a big hit in Sweden - to the extent that a Google search for Camilla Lackberg brings up many torrents of the TV version of the book.