Most Nordic Noir is set amongst the lower middle class to high class Scandinavian sets of society. Jens Lapidus’s novels, not so. His novels grovel inside the lower class blatte (a resident in Northern Europe who is from North African descent) and their associates. Most characters are criminals, wannabes or guys trying to break into regular Scandinavian society. In this case, Sweden. This novel is notable for its lack of female characters other than a few abused wives and mixed-heritage whores. It is a testosterone-fueled romp through several subsets of Nordic society: a disillusioned and PTSD-affected mercenary named Niklas with a fixation on men who abuse women, a cop on both sides of the law, Thomas: “During the day, he was an upright citizen. At night, he belonged to the underworld. Just like the enemy. Maybe he was the enemy?” Mahmud, a blatte with aspirations. He really thinks he can escape his background, go to college and be somebody. They are drawn together, two of them without realizing it, into Operation Magnum,” Niklas’s grand plan for avenging the evil done to Swedish women by exploiting men of all sorts and levels of society. Niklas undertakes the murder to of two of the known (to him) abusers and he plans for something grander. There is an unsolved murder of an abuser of his mother, found mutilated with his face and fingertips erased, in the basement of his mother’s flat. It is unclear whether or not Niklas was the murderer. Tommy, disillusioned with police work and stuck with a rookie female partner one night, gets so involved with a drunk in a bar that he gets brought up on charges and assigned to the traffic desk as punishment before his trial. Mahmud gets involved in petty crimes with and without the assistance of blatte friends while maintaining his upward hopes and dreams. He is also into drug use of various types, turning to rohypnol to keep him alert during nighttime adventures, pot and hash for regular daytime use. Thomas eventually ends up accepting an outside parttime job sitting in a strip club, serving as a bouncer, working for the Boss—Radovan, the Serb—a hardly clean individual who, though personable in person, is a vicious killer, controlling crime in Stockholm. The assassination of former Prime Minister Olaf Palme, often a staple in Swedish Noir, plays a role in all this, especially in Thomas’s assumed role as an undercover detective trying to link a man named Raskell, the murdered man and abuser of his mother, to a wider plot. This is a very large novel—491 heavy pages—and heavy going because much of it is written in the language of and in the company of, the blatte culture. Much underworld slang pervades the pages and not a little of it is in Arabic slang. In a way, this is part of the interest of Lapidus’s books—it gives an authentic look at the underbelly of Stockholm and of Swedish politics not often present in other Nordic Noir. But it does get tedious at times and often makes for moments of hesitation about finishing the marathon. Good reading for those who want that underbelly view, skip it for those who want the old standard NN. As for me, I’ll take a break from it all for a while as finishing a Lapidus novel makes one yearn for a hot, cleansing shower.