Series: Ellen Tamm

Liv

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Liv
Liv
, ,

, Book # 2
Scribe
August 2016
Paperback
400
Swedish
Paul Norlen
April 15, 2019 April 21, 2019

Death, death, death!’ Ellen screamed, hitting the steering wheel so hard her palms ached.

Crime reporter Ellen Tamm hasn’t been the same since the Lycke case a few months ago. It is now August and all summer she has been on sick leave, shut in her apartment and spinning out of control. Under pressure — and threats — from her parents and her employer, TV4, she agrees to head home to her family farm, Örelo, to try to get some help and get a handle on her mental health.

On her way to Örelo, Ellen stops for petrol in the little community of Stentuna where she stumbles upon the news of a murdered woman, her body discovered in the small hours of the morning. The woman isn’t from the area, and no one seems to know who she is or what she was doing in Stentuna. Her name was Liv.

Attempting to distract herself from her own dark past and the mysteries that plague her, Ellen starts to investigate Liv’s death. She finds herself drawn into a web of family secrets, lies, and betrayal. Reports keep surfacing of strange behaviour among the children of Stentuna. And then awful things start to happen to Ellen. Someone, or perhaps many people, are trying to silence her.

All the while, Ellen is trying in vain to escape the questions that continue to press in on her and crowd her mind: questions about her sister, the lake, and what really happened that terrible day.

About the book

In this book we find reporter Ellen Tam in crisis after the events of the first book. So she decides to go back to her mother’s home to spend a period in which to rest and recover from the previous events. But when she gets home, she finds herself involved in a murder. Despite the sabbatical period she returns to work because she wants to know why a young woman died.

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Lycke

LauraLeave a Comment on Lycke
Lycke
,

, Book # 1
Scribe Publications
March 26th, 2015
ebook
352
English
January 7, 2018 January 12, 2018

‘Death, death, death,’ she whispered to herself. But it was already too late. The panic was growing inside her.

On a cold and stormy Friday in May, a young girl disappears without a trace from outside Stockholm’s Royal Tennis Hall.

The missing girl is Lycke, and assigned to report on her story is TV4’s hot-headed crime reporter Ellen Tamm. As the police begin their search, Ellen starts her own investigation, delving into Lycke’s life: her family, the nanny, the kids who taunted her at school.

As Ellen is drawn deeper into a tangle of secrets, lies, and betrayals — and frustrated by the odd behaviour of Lycke’s family, as well as corrupt police, her upstart new boss, and the disturbing threats being made against her — she becomes more and more possessed by the task she has been given, tortured by the echoes of her own past, of the darkness that haunts her.

Will she find Lycke before it is too late for either of them?

Mikaela Bley’s debut, 'Lycke', is the haunting first novel in the Ellen Tamm thriller series, and is an exciting new voice in Swedish crime writing.

About the book

Lycke is a Swedish detective story and the first in the Ellen Tamm series. Ellen is a journalist and has some personal problems, the one that stands out most is that she is a bit obsessed with death. She also has a secret and the disappearance of a child is likely to bring out this tragic part of her life.

I like the fact that the “secret” of the protagonist comes out in the middle and not immediately or at the end of the book. The reader thus becomes curious but does not need to read the entire book to ask what happened.

Continue reading “Lycke”