ANOTHER TIME ANOTHER LIFE

1975:  Six young people take the staff of the West German embassy hostage, demanding that the Baader-Meinhof members being held as prisoners in West Germany be released immediately. 

1989:  When a Swedish civil servant is murdered, the two leading detectives on the case, Anna Holt and Bo Jarnebring, find their investigation hastily shelved by an incompetent and corrupt senior investigator. 

1999:  Lars Johansson, having just joined the Swedish Security Police, decides to tie up a few loose ends left behind by his predecessor – specifically, two files on Swedes who had allegedly collaborated on the 1975 takeover of the West German embassy, one of whom turned out to be the murder victim in 1989.  Johansson reopens the investigation and, with help from detectives Jarnebring and Holt, follows the leads – right up to the doorstep of Sweden's newly minted minister of justice.

The above summary is cribbed directly from the book’s official blurb, because I found it very difficult to sum up the plot without it.  The three separate investigations, on three timelines, are described in great detail, but it’s sometimes difficult to plough through all the irrelevant detail to find the thread that connects the three plots together.  There is potentially a good story in this book, but it gets lost amongst the meandering narrative.

There are also some potentially good characters, but they sometimes come across as being unrealistic.  The 1999 investigation has three female characters on the case, all of whom could be very strong characters, but none of them come across that way.  When the three of them are working late on the case, they decide they should get take-away, “to be like the men”.  For two nights in a row they end up getting sushi, because according to this novel – quite inexplicably – only women eat fish and only men eat meat.

This novel apparently has its roots in a real-life Swedish political murder.  It’s likely that someone with knowledge of – and interest in – Swedish politics will appreciate this book more than I did.