Buried in Secret is the tenth book in Viveca Sten’s Sandamn Murders series. I’ve read all of them. Maybe I’m just suffering from over-exposure to the series, but I have to admit, unfortunately, that I’ve enjoyed the last several books less than the earlier ones. Buried in Secret is not a bad book by any means, but one aspect of the book, which I’ll get to below, annoyed me and lessened my enjoyment.
The story is set in August 2016, several months after the conclusion of the events in the previous series book, In Bad Company. Blasting activity at a construction project on Telegrafholmen, an uninhabited island near Sandamn, has unearthed human bone fragments. Since it appears more likely than not that the bones belong to a murder victim, Stockholm police inspector Thomas Andreasson and his partner, Aram Gorgis, are assigned to investigate. Unfortunately, they have little to go on. Because of the violence of the blast, only fragments can be recovered, and there is no indication of how long they’ve been in the ground. Identifying the skeleton through DNA extraction or other forensic analysis is problematic and may be impossible.
The police are pressured to solve the case quickly so construction can resume. Attempting to discover who was buried there, they review files on several people who disappeared and were presumed dead although no body was ever found. They soon narrow their focus to two young women, Astrid Forsell and Siri Grandin, who went missing at about the same time ten years earlier.
As she often does, Sten plays with dual timelines. She intersperses flashback chapters about these women at intervals throughout the book, interrupting the primary narrative of the 2016 investigation. These flashbacks ratchet up the tension as we learn more about them before their disappearances. We are kept guessing about which woman (if either) was buried on Telegrafholmen.
So far so good. But where Sten goes wrong, in my opinion, is in how she depicts Nora Linde. Along with her lifelong friend Thomas Andreasson, Nora has been one of the two primary characters in the series. She is a prosecutor with the Economic Crimes Authority. She is spending the summer on Sandamn Island on leave from her job due to stress from the horrific case that was the subject of the previous book. Nora blames herself for letting a victim down in that case, and she also lives in fear because of a threat of violent revenge by the perpetrator’s brother, Emir Kovač.
Nora’s stress level is out of control. She is self-medicating with wine and painkillers. She’s in this frame of mind when she learns about the Telegrafholmen bones and decides to conduct her own unauthorized investigation. It’s not the first time that she’s poked around in police business that doesn’t concern her. But she can always rationalize her behavior, and she can usually count on Thomas to either welcome her help or forgive her if he doesn’t.
I’m sure that Sten is trying to show how PTSD can lead to irrational actions and potentially wreck someone’s life. But to me, she goes too far in making Nora unlikable, almost insufferable, this time around. Actually, I thought Nora went off the rails in the previous book, and now it’s gotten worse. And Sten’s writing style doesn’t help in this regard, either. Although she uses the third person, we are privy to all of Nora’s thoughts about blaming herself, her drinking, her marital concerns, and her fear of Kovač—and it’s very repetitive. A little of this goes a long way. I didn’t sign on to be Nora’s therapist.
That’s my primary gripe about the book. The mystery of the unidentified bones is intriguing. We’re kept in suspense about the identities of the victim and the perpetrator until almost the last possible moment. If only Sten had kept Nora on a more even keel, I would have enjoyed the book more and rated it more highly.