The Ninth Grave: The ikea of crime

In the latest novel from Sweden's Stefan Ahnhem, Stockholm cop Fabian Risk has troubles with his colleagues, especially a female cop whose husband hates him, and even bigger problems in his marriage. The kids, including a wayward teenage son, are expecting the parents to divorce any minute. Incapable of coping on the home front, Risk is attracted to a semi-lesbian computer wizard who helps with his investigation into a series of crazy killings but who, at the same time, wants to take sexual advantage of him. Subplots and parallel plots galore take us to Denmark and rural Sweden, as well as the Near East and China, all tied together by two or more serial killers-or are they all one and the same?

Sound familiar? Yes, The Ninth Grave ticks off all the mandatory aspects of the IKEA-style, mass-manufacture Nordic noir: alcoholism, junk food, bad machine coffee, sexual frustration leading to extramarital sex, and lots of snow and ice- the usual 'boredom tropes'. These disharmonies playing in a minor key are what give Nordic noir its peculiarly offbeat but authentic Scandinavian dullness, which attracted readers tired of the bang-for-buck glam of US-UK mass-market pulp.

Many of us have read some version of this book before. Ahnhem's plot is somewhat more convoluted than the average Swedish thriller. The violence is more sadistic and the descriptions more graphic. But it remains all too familiar.

That's not necessarily bad. We read pulp expecting stories that follow a tight formula and hence never disappoint. And on that score, Ahnhem delivers. Like Ahnhem's previous novel, Victim Without a Face, this one features sadistic revenge serial killings involving ingenious torture implements, as well as bits of social commentary-a staple of Scandinavian noir.

Annhem tends to include too many characters and describe them in too much detail, but his writing is more than decent and the pace fast enough to keep us turning the pages. As is often the case with the English translations of Scandinavian pulp, however, the functional prose lacks elegance and imagination.

Though not as gripping as some of the others in the genre, it's not a bad choice to bring along to the beach in Goa. When the sun boils your beer, reading something bone-chilling can be the antidote- if the idea of Scandinavians turned into sausage meat by psychopaths strikes your fancy.