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The Sleepwalker
SOME NIGHTMARES YOU CAN'T WAKE UP FROM . . .
The stunning new crime thriller from the master of Scandinavian noir, Lars Kepler - available now!
An alarm sounds in the middle of the night for a burglary in progress at a winter-closed campsite in Bredäng, outside Stockholm.
The police spot a light in one of the farthest caravans and when the officers open the door they are greeted by a horrific sight. Floors, walls and furniture are completely covered in blood. A man has been killed with an axe and brutally dismembered.
On the floor lies a young man sleeping with a severed arm as a pillow. He is arrested and taken to Kronoberg prison, identified as seventeen-year-old Hugo Sand, the son of a famous writer.
Hugo suffers from a rare sleepwalking condition that is activated by nightmares. He is either the perpetrator or a witness, but claims to remember nothing from the night.
Detective Joona Linna contacts her old friend Erik Maria Bark to use hypnosis to try to find out what happened inside the caravan. So begins the sleepless hunt for a serial killer who is only just getting started . . .
From the 17 million copy global bestseller Lars Kepler, author of The Mirror Man, comes the most anticipated crime thriller of 2025 - perfect for fans of Jo Nesbo, Ragnar Jonasson and Alex North.
Praise for Lars Kepler:
'Fast and furiously paced . . . I lapped it up' - EVENING STANDARD
'Chilling, nerve-shredding, clever, and impossibly dark' - CHRIS WHITAKER
'A rollercoaster ride of a thriller full of striking twists' - MAIL ON SUNDAY
'As dark and chilling as a Swedish winter' - GREGG HURWITZ
'A non-stop rollercoaster of suspense' - JEFFERY DEAVER
'Ferocious, visceral storytelling' - DAILY MAIL
'Thrilling' - SUNDAY TIMES
The stunning new crime thriller from the master of Scandinavian noir, Lars Kepler - available now!
An alarm sounds in the middle of the night for a burglary in progress at a winter-closed campsite in Bredäng, outside Stockholm.
The police spot a light in one of the farthest caravans and when the officers open the door they are greeted by a horrific sight. Floors, walls and furniture are completely covered in blood. A man has been killed with an axe and brutally dismembered.
On the floor lies a young man sleeping with a severed arm as a pillow. He is arrested and taken to Kronoberg prison, identified as seventeen-year-old Hugo Sand, the son of a famous writer.
Hugo suffers from a rare sleepwalking condition that is activated by nightmares. He is either the perpetrator or a witness, but claims to remember nothing from the night.
Detective Joona Linna contacts her old friend Erik Maria Bark to use hypnosis to try to find out what happened inside the caravan. So begins the sleepless hunt for a serial killer who is only just getting started . . .
From the 17 million copy global bestseller Lars Kepler, author of The Mirror Man, comes the most anticipated crime thriller of 2025 - perfect for fans of Jo Nesbo, Ragnar Jonasson and Alex North.
Praise for Lars Kepler:
'Fast and furiously paced . . . I lapped it up' - EVENING STANDARD
'Chilling, nerve-shredding, clever, and impossibly dark' - CHRIS WHITAKER
'A rollercoaster ride of a thriller full of striking twists' - MAIL ON SUNDAY
'As dark and chilling as a Swedish winter' - GREGG HURWITZ
'A non-stop rollercoaster of suspense' - JEFFERY DEAVER
'Ferocious, visceral storytelling' - DAILY MAIL
'Thrilling' - SUNDAY TIMES
563 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 31, 2025
48 people are currently reading
76 people want to read
About the author
Lars Kepler
64 books5,877 followersLars Kepler is the pseudonym of critically acclaimed husband and wife team Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, authors of the No. 1 internationally bestselling Joona Linna series. With seven installments to date, the series has sold 13 million copies in 40 languages. The Ahndorils were both established writers before they adopted the pen name Lars Kepler, and have each published several acclaimed novels.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 13, 2025
Why does not one adult in this book question a 37 year old woman in a relationship with 17 school kid????!
January 30, 2026
Bang average
October 7, 2025
I found this an interesting listen however I feel like I'm missing some character information/background from a previous book which I wasn't aware of.
Lots of twist involved and I thought I figured out the really killer but was wrong!
Lots of twist involved and I thought I figured out the really killer but was wrong!
August 7, 2025
I’m drawn to the darkness of Scandi-noir, and Lars Kepler’s Joona Linna series is darkness itself. The latest novel in the Joona Linna series, The Sleepwalker combines horror, personal trauma, and psychological suspense.
The opening setting is a desolate, closed campsite outside Stockholm, in the depths of winter. Responding to an emergency call, police enter one of the furthest caravans and are met with a scene straight out of a nightmare. Walls, floors, and furniture are drenched in blood, and a body lies brutally murdered. Amid the carnage lies a teenage boy, asleep, using a severed arm as his pillow. The boy is Hugo Sand, the seventeen-year-old son of bestselling writer Bernard Sand, who suffers from a rare form of sleepwalking, induced by his nightmares. Questioned by police, Hugo insists he remembers nothing. Joona must try to open up this boy’s memory while pondering the question ‘Can a sleepwalker kill without ever waking up?’
Lars Kepler’s style is unmistakably tense. Short chapters, cliff‑hanger endings, and alternating perspectives kept me turning the pages. The tone is cold and clinical. The descriptions of blood and death are pretty gruesome yet never gratuitous (though I’m less able to say that in respect of the later sex scenes). It’s the kind of visceral horror that stays in your mind well after the book is closed.
Joona Linna is a detective peering into the shadows, finding not just a killer but human darkness. In The Sleepwalker, he’s weary, but his determination is as fierce as ever. The first half of the book is dominated by Hugo’s experiences and his visits to a sleep clinic. Joona doesn’t really come into his own until later in the book.
Joona asks his old friend Erik Maria Bark to retrieve memories from Hugo’s mind. Erik’s role as a psychologist‑hypnotherapist is perfect for Hugo’s blank recall. These scenes were especially tense with Erik Maria Bark gently coaxing fragments from a teenage mind, peeling away nightmares to find the truth. Joona and Erik’s partnership works because Linna remains the hunter, methodical and stubborn, while Bark’s clinical precision and psychological insight open windows into dark memories. Every new memory revelation shifted my suspicion.
Saga Bauer, Operational Superintendent at the Swedish Security Service, is notably absent in this case, though Joona wants her to return to work. Joona without Saga feels incomplete—her presence and emotional ballast have anchored previous books. Saga’s absence enhances the feeling of isolation in this story.
Hugo is drawn sympathetically: as the son of a famous writer, he is subject to public scrutiny even before his sleepwalking nightmare. Hugo’s guilt, shame, and vulnerability are tightly wound around his father’s fame and expectations as much as around the physical horror of the crime scene.
The trauma within the Sand household simmers with tension. Hugo’s father is confused and fearful. He’s torn between defending his son and confronting the horror Hugo is implicated in, with no idea whether Hugo is a perpetrator or a victim. The novel explores grief, denial, and the weight of parental failure. We also see Hugo’s relationship with his girlfriend, Olga, a strange woman who is helping him to find his birth mother.
The body count mounts, and each is more brutal than the last. Clues are scarce, and evidence is both forensic and psychological. The gore increases, and there’s a sense that the killer is taunting police. A vivid hair is found at scenes, bodies are posed in sleeping positions; all these forensic breadcrumbs make the a procedural case, while Bark’s hypnosis technique digs ever deeper.
Verdict: The Sleepwalker isn’t subtle. It doesn’t aim to be quiet comfort reading—it’s sleepwalking into nightmare territory; forensic terror mixed with psychological wreckage, tied up in Linna’s unstoppable drive to solve the case. The Sleepwalker is bleak, engrossing, and fascinating. Kepler leads us through horror and hypnosis, crime scenes and shattered memories. This is Scandi noir stripped bare, blood‑soaked in grief and nightmares.
The opening setting is a desolate, closed campsite outside Stockholm, in the depths of winter. Responding to an emergency call, police enter one of the furthest caravans and are met with a scene straight out of a nightmare. Walls, floors, and furniture are drenched in blood, and a body lies brutally murdered. Amid the carnage lies a teenage boy, asleep, using a severed arm as his pillow. The boy is Hugo Sand, the seventeen-year-old son of bestselling writer Bernard Sand, who suffers from a rare form of sleepwalking, induced by his nightmares. Questioned by police, Hugo insists he remembers nothing. Joona must try to open up this boy’s memory while pondering the question ‘Can a sleepwalker kill without ever waking up?’
Lars Kepler’s style is unmistakably tense. Short chapters, cliff‑hanger endings, and alternating perspectives kept me turning the pages. The tone is cold and clinical. The descriptions of blood and death are pretty gruesome yet never gratuitous (though I’m less able to say that in respect of the later sex scenes). It’s the kind of visceral horror that stays in your mind well after the book is closed.
Joona Linna is a detective peering into the shadows, finding not just a killer but human darkness. In The Sleepwalker, he’s weary, but his determination is as fierce as ever. The first half of the book is dominated by Hugo’s experiences and his visits to a sleep clinic. Joona doesn’t really come into his own until later in the book.
Joona asks his old friend Erik Maria Bark to retrieve memories from Hugo’s mind. Erik’s role as a psychologist‑hypnotherapist is perfect for Hugo’s blank recall. These scenes were especially tense with Erik Maria Bark gently coaxing fragments from a teenage mind, peeling away nightmares to find the truth. Joona and Erik’s partnership works because Linna remains the hunter, methodical and stubborn, while Bark’s clinical precision and psychological insight open windows into dark memories. Every new memory revelation shifted my suspicion.
Saga Bauer, Operational Superintendent at the Swedish Security Service, is notably absent in this case, though Joona wants her to return to work. Joona without Saga feels incomplete—her presence and emotional ballast have anchored previous books. Saga’s absence enhances the feeling of isolation in this story.
Hugo is drawn sympathetically: as the son of a famous writer, he is subject to public scrutiny even before his sleepwalking nightmare. Hugo’s guilt, shame, and vulnerability are tightly wound around his father’s fame and expectations as much as around the physical horror of the crime scene.
The trauma within the Sand household simmers with tension. Hugo’s father is confused and fearful. He’s torn between defending his son and confronting the horror Hugo is implicated in, with no idea whether Hugo is a perpetrator or a victim. The novel explores grief, denial, and the weight of parental failure. We also see Hugo’s relationship with his girlfriend, Olga, a strange woman who is helping him to find his birth mother.
The body count mounts, and each is more brutal than the last. Clues are scarce, and evidence is both forensic and psychological. The gore increases, and there’s a sense that the killer is taunting police. A vivid hair is found at scenes, bodies are posed in sleeping positions; all these forensic breadcrumbs make the a procedural case, while Bark’s hypnosis technique digs ever deeper.
Verdict: The Sleepwalker isn’t subtle. It doesn’t aim to be quiet comfort reading—it’s sleepwalking into nightmare territory; forensic terror mixed with psychological wreckage, tied up in Linna’s unstoppable drive to solve the case. The Sleepwalker is bleak, engrossing, and fascinating. Kepler leads us through horror and hypnosis, crime scenes and shattered memories. This is Scandi noir stripped bare, blood‑soaked in grief and nightmares.
September 8, 2025
I did not realize how dark and gory and very much horror like this story would be. Set in the very fitting darkness and storms of Sweden with a killer that goes around with an axe and very much knows how to use it against those they deem worthy of being chopped into little bits. With the only surviving witness being a sleepwalker who wakes up in the middle of one of the crime scenes, it did leave me frantically reading through the story to see if it could be untangled before more people end up dead (sadly the killer is very prolific). Luckily Joona Linna is on the case, using DNA, hypnotists, and research into old cases, tracking down suspects with links to the crimes (sometimes with deadly consequences beyond the serial killer with the axe).
The characters in this story are complicated like Joona with a ease in killing, or Hugo with his search for his mother and his troubling sleepwalking, or Agneta with her research into the case and working with Bernard to also get to the bottom of it before the killer decides to make sure the only witness can't reveal what he knows. There are weird dark bits like with Olga but I guess it added to the depth of the area where this is all happening. It was an interesting murder thriller, especially with the sleepwalker touch and I am now interested in what other cases Joona Linna has solved.
The characters in this story are complicated like Joona with a ease in killing, or Hugo with his search for his mother and his troubling sleepwalking, or Agneta with her research into the case and working with Bernard to also get to the bottom of it before the killer decides to make sure the only witness can't reveal what he knows. There are weird dark bits like with Olga but I guess it added to the depth of the area where this is all happening. It was an interesting murder thriller, especially with the sleepwalker touch and I am now interested in what other cases Joona Linna has solved.
August 22, 2025
Hypnotists again? I just felt lazy to come up with a similar plot than previous books. Even though I have read and loved every book of the series, this one felt very similarly written to previous ones.
October 13, 2025
Sorry to say, they jumped the shark. I have loved all of their books. Can't wait for each one to come out. This one, for whatever reason, was not widely available. It wasn't easy, but got the Kindle version from Canada, and am glad I spent $12, rather than $30. Totally contrived.
Another author(s) gone woke, too. Gays? Check. Immigrants? Check. Diversity? Check. Right-wing radicals/white power as bad guys? Yep. And very graphic sex.
I guess it's inevitable (think King or Grisham), but sooner or later, they run out of fresh ideas. Too bad.
Another author(s) gone woke, too. Gays? Check. Immigrants? Check. Diversity? Check. Right-wing radicals/white power as bad guys? Yep. And very graphic sex.
I guess it's inevitable (think King or Grisham), but sooner or later, they run out of fresh ideas. Too bad.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews