Talk about multitasking: Karlstad police detective Fredrik Adamsson--an alias created for former FBI agent John Adderley by the Swedish authorities at the behest of the bureau's witness protection program--is hunting for a killer while being hunted himself. The Other Sister, the follow-up to The Bucket List, may have a knotty plot, but the story is so clearly laid out by Peter Mohlin and Peter Nyström that readers can devote their mental energies to the thriller's vexing central question: Does John Adderley deserve to get away? The novel, translated from the Swedish by Ian Giles, toggles between John's point of view and that of 29-year-old Alicia Bjelke, chief technology officer of Raw, a successful dating platform that she cofounded with her sister, the glamorous Stella. Alicia is a whip-smart developer but remains in Stella's shadow, in part due to the facial scarring that Alicia suffered as a child. When Stella turns up murdered at a coffee roastery, John is put in charge of the case.
As The Other Sister proceeds, the "right" thing to do becomes murkier; as John admits to himself, he "was deploying his own homemade moral philosophy, which seemed to take it for granted that most things were allowed if you were trying to secure your own liberty and survival." The novel's morality-play aspect is expertly balanced with mainstays of the thriller genre, culminating in a hair-raising twist. It also contains one of the cleverest maneuverings of a dead body into the trunk of a car that readers are likely to encounter. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer