Book Shout-Out: Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End (Book 1)

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End Book Cover

Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End: The Story of a Crime
Leif GW Persson
Knopf Doubleday
September 2010

Here’s the blurb form the publisher:

A young man falls to his death from a window in a student dorm in Stockholm, his loose shoe striking and killing the little dog being taken for his evening walk by an old man. It seems to be a mundane suicide—at least that’s what the police choose to think. But the young man is American, not Swedish, and there are a couple of odd things about his room when they search it. . . .

From these tiny beginnings, Leif GW Persson slowly begins to unravel a puzzle that gets larger and larger as it becomes more and more complex, until it sweeps us into a web of international espionage, backroom politics, greed, sheer incompetence, and the shoddy work of Sweden’s intelligence force that leads to the murder of the prime minister.

The first novel in a dark and dazzling trilogy that has become the defining fictional account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme—an event that triggered the biggest criminal investigation in recorded history—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a riveting insider’s combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural by a writer universally acknowledged as Sweden’s leading criminologist.

I’m not terribly big on crime fiction but this author is being compared to Mankell and Larsson. Don’t you love the cover? It’s the first book in a trilogy too. Trilogies seem to be pretty popular these days. I love them because the anticipation over each release is great in and of itself, but when you pick up a book that’s part of a trilogy, it’s like seeing an old friend that you haven’t seen in awhile. I feel as if I must have this one.

13 thoughts on “Book Shout-Out: Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End (Book 1)”

This does sound like a good one…(poor little unsuspecting dog) LOL

Ti says:

October 1, 2010 at 9:31 am

I know! What a way to open a novel.

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I just got The Ice Princess from the library so we’ll have to compare notes!

Sounds interesting – I can’t quite get a clear pic of the cover but I do like it. I just finished The Postcard Killers where the Stockholm police are portrayed as less than efficient so maybe that was accurate, said to say.

Ti says:

October 1, 2010 at 9:33 am

The book cover has a layer of ice over it with a tinge of blood (me thinks). The underlying image is not clear because of the ice, unless your web view is completely different than mine.

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Thanks for highlighting this one…I will have to check it out!

I’m always interested in a new crime fiction series (what is one more among friends?). I can’t wait to hear if this one holds up!

I do love the cover and I think the book sounds fantastic!

OOOOOh…this sounds really mysterious and really good…I do love the cover…and I am already sad for the little dog and the old man…

I like the sound of it…but I’m going to wait until you read it and then decide from there 😀

It definitely sounds intriguing.

oooh!! that looks and sounds really good. i love to read thrillers in the winter–something about snuggling up with a blanket and a creepy book screams fall/winter to me. add a cup of hot chocolate and i’m in heaven.

the only thing that makes me crazy about trilogies (or series books) is the WAITING. i would rather wait until they are all published before picking up the first one. i’m impatient like that. lol.