Medusa

This is the new instalment in the Joona Linna series that deliberately reconnects the series to Jurek Walter. The book opens with the myth of Medusa as a woman who is victimised and then punished instead of her attacker, becoming a monster because of the injustice done to her. That idea becomes the model for the killer at the centre of the novel: somebody who began as a victim but has transformed victimhood into a justification for punishing an enormous circle of people.

The first murder occurs inside Helix, a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital outside Stockholm. Twenty-five-year-old psychiatric care assistant Tommy Kiefer is working a night shift on high-risk ward H1. Tommy is lonely, insecure and emotionally unstable after the end of his relationship with Alyssa. He is also carrying a secret: months earlier, while under the influence of morphine and emotionally distraught, he had sex with a vulnerable female patient he was supposed to be caring for. He knows he crossed an unforgivable professional boundary but has never reported himself.

Among Tommy’s colleagues is psychiatrist Felicia Kohler-Frost, a compassionate doctor who believes psychiatric patients should be treated with dignity rather than merely contained. One night the hospital seems strangely empty. Electronic locks have been malfunctioning and several safety systems have been interfered with. Tommy smells burning and follows floating sparks through the corridor until he discovers Felicia on fire. She has been immobilised, wrapped or bound in acetone-soaked material and deliberately burned alive. Investigators later establish that cameras and smoke detectors were sabotaged and that Felicia had been given a paralysing drug.