Within the mystery genre, crimes are typically committed for nefarious purposes. Swedish novelist M.T. Edvardsson's The Woman Inside challenges this assumption while also considering the value of moral justice.
This cagey, multilayered thriller opens with a report from an officer on the scene when the bodies of a married couple are found inside their home in the Swedish college town of Lund. The novel proceeds with the alternating first-person perspectives of three people who are somehow wrapped up in the mess.
Karla Larsson has moved to Lund to escape her hardscrabble past and study law. To make ends meet, she takes a part-time job cleaning the opulent home of Dr. Steven Rytter and his wife, Regina. Karla is taking an online criminal law course, and student housing isn't giving her the quiet she needs. When she spots an ad for a lodger on Facebook, she pounces. The ad is placed by single dad Bill Olsson, a widower about a year into his grief and sorely in need of income: he's unemployed, late with his rent, and desperate to stay in Lund.
Meanwhile, 29-year-old Jennica Jungstedt gets by as an adviser for an online site offering psychic advice. Jennica thinks she has found her dream guy--a 47-year-old doctor she met through Tinder. She wants to parade him around but knows her friends would be skeptical. His name? Steven Rytter.
There are no angels among the three narrators. Stitch by stitch, Edvardsson (A Nearly Normal Family) knits their stories together in an impressive feat of structural engineering, while recognizing that social circumstances can tempt otherwise decent people to slither to the dark side. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer