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.
The Torso, Helene Tursten
This is the second book translated from this author and it starts out with a torso in a bag being found on a beach in Sweden. The only clue to the identify of the body is a tattoo, and the body, as well as dismembered, has been horribly mutilated.
This crime is soon connected with a similar mutilation murder in Denmark, so the investigation moves between Goteborg, Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark with Irene Huss and her colleagues working closely with Danish police. The mutilations are pretty graphic and the violence is extreme, but strangely there are suddenly a series of what seemed to be connected murders, although the mutilation is not as severe. The murderer seems to be very close to Huss and her movements.
Huss is a great character - a bit grumpy, a bit dismissive, prickly but not self-indulgent with it. The supporting cast of characters are also well drawn out and Huss's family life is interwoven into the story but not to the point where it distracts from the investigation itself.
The first book in the translation series is Detective Inspector Huss, which I've got but haven't read yet. I picked this one up because of an upcoming discussion at 4_Mystery_Addicts and now I'm really going to have to excavate the earlier book.