Detective Inspector Irene Huss begins a murder investigation with a ghost as her most obvious suspect in Helene Tursten’s Night Rounds (Soho Crime: Feb. 14, 2012 release). Laura A. Wideburg provides an excellent translation of this second book in Tursten’s Inspector Irene Huss series, originally published in Sweden in 1999.
During a nighttime blackout at Doctor Sverker Löwander’s private hospital in Göteborg, Sweden, Nils Peterzén, an elderly patient, dies when the power supply to his breathing equipment fails. Minutes later, a security guard discovers the body of ICU nurse Marianne Svärd in the hospital’s electrical room. The young woman has been strangled to death.
Assigned to the investigation, Detective Inspector Irene Huss of Göteborg’s Violent Crimes Unit learns that Siv Persson, the nurse on duty during the blackout, swears that she saw Tekla Olsson in the stairwell during the incident. The problem with this identification is the undeniable fact that Nurse Tekla committed suicide in 1947, hanging herself in the hospital’s attic.
In addition to the supposed presence of Nurse Tekla at the crime scene, Inspector Huss puzzles over the disappearance of a second nurse. Linda Svensson, a friend of Marianne Svärd, failed to report for to the hospital for her assigned shift on the day following the blackout.
Inspector Huss realizes that either Peterzén or Svärd could have been the murderer’s intended victim, and her investigation encompasses the families and friends of both. She also looks into the history of Löwander Hospital to determine how Nurse Tekla might be connected to the case.
Night Rounds, like Quentin Bates’ Cold Comfort, provides an example of Scandinavian crime fiction which uses a female police officer as its protagonist. Both works include an emphasis on the personal as well as the professional lives of the women involved.
In a 2007 interview with Cara Black, Tursten comments on the realism of this treatment. "My inspiration for Irene Huss were all the real female policewomen that I had met," she states. "They were all 'normal'; they had families and normal social lives."
Helene Tursten has written ten books in the Inspector Irene Huss series, published in Sweden from 1998 through 2008. In additional to Night Rounds, Soho Crime has released English translations of Detective Inspector Huss (book 1), of The Torso (book 3) and of Glass Devil (book 5).
FTC Full Disclosure: A review copy of this work was provided by Soho Crime.
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