Stockholm Delete by Jens Lapidus

Stockholm Delete focuses around 5 specific characters:

Nikola a late teen who is known at Bible Man because he can speak Slav and runs with the criminal classes of that nationality. His mother had him committed to a juvenile offenders facility to try and straighten him out but now he's free and ready to work for Isak again, even if he can't pull the trigger when needed.

Teddy is Nikola's uncle and did a stretch for kidnapping a man for what turned out to be about more than money.  Now he's trying to go straight and works as a Personal Investigator for the corporate law firm Leijon. His criminal past and, in particular, that kidnapping are now coming back to haunt him.

Emilie has just passed her final Law Society examination has become a fully fledged lawyer.  She works in corporate law for Leijon but just hours after her final qualification she is contacted to take on a criminal case and, despite her better judgement, she takes the case.

Benjamin - Accused of murder but in a semi-comatose state he cannot defend himself and in a rare moment of clarity asks for Emilie to take his defence case telling her "Make Teddy Understand".

Mats - Victim of a kidnapping, inveterate gambler turned police nark after getting himself in far too deep with the wrong people, father of Benjamin and suicide.

These 5 people are all somehow linked to a murder of an unknown man on Varmdo and this is their tale.

Sounds great doesn't it.  However, Jens Lapidus telling does not live up to the expectation.  He uses Mats' testimony to the police as a flashback to explan why we are here but these are so badly placed it interrupts the narrative flow at crucial points, points that never seem to be returned to.  I appreciate the need for cliffhangers in a suspense/thriller novel but these just served to interrupt the flow and jolt this reader out of the story.  The tired old cliches are also present and I was really hoping that we wouldn't have a corrupt cop; the super-lawyer was evidently going to be present.  At least the criminal element weren't one dimensional but real characters who might do "bad things" to survive but they were also devoted fathers and it was refreshing to see them depicted as people.

This is only the fourth Scandi Noir novel I've read and I enjoyed it slightly more than the first three (Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy) and I am not sure if this genre is simply not for me or if I have just chosen badly.  On paper you'd think I would love this book but in actuality I found it a genuine hard slog and would have been happy to give up a hundred pages in but I persevered to the bitter end. 

If you are truly a Scandi Noir fan and genuinely enjoyed Steig Larsson then you will probably love this book.  As someone who enjoys Caz Frear, Mo Hayder, Karin Slaughter and numerous others I wanted to love it too but I just couldn't.

I RECEIVED A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM READERS FIRST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.

**Review originally published August 24th, 2017**