This is the first book I have read by this author, so I think there's a good chance of her having improved her skills as a writer of crime fiction after this book, since I also see that it's the first book in a whole series of the detective Ingrid Bergman... (and btw. I do like it that her detective has been named after the famous actress from the past). .
I cannot tell, of course, if she has improved, since I have only read this novel and unfortunately it has not exactly ignited my longing to read more from her.
Having said that, it's not a BAD novel, as such..it's a decent and traditional crime/detective story, neutrally written in style, which was good enough to keep me reading it till the end..but not good enough to keep me awake at night in bed in order to read beyond my waking deadline.
The atmosphere of the novel is not very pronounced, and the character descriptions are tame and superficial for the most part. There is a lot of information about the police team meeting at this and that hour, next morning or this afternoon, and a lot of meetings in that meeting-room...with new meetings to come , at this and that time... again and again.
As for the private lives of Ingrid and the other police officers, we don't get to know anything interesting about that either. In addition, I think it was painfully easy to figure out the plot very early in the novel... both about the transvestism and about who the murderer and his mother were, which of course also made it less exciting.But the most frustrating thing for me was the ending. Not that it was the old Martha who was the brains and the willpower behind it all.. I liked that.. but rather that we didn't learn ANYTHING about the son at the end. It was so unsatisfying. The novel started with a boy who was raped by his priestly father.. and in the course of the novel's plot we were told that the murderer was pale with a strange face and bottomless black eyes emitting blind rage, and when we finally got to his capture, we learned nothing more about him. We didn't get to "see" him.
What kind of rage was it that he was carrying, what was he like as a person when he wasn't out hitting other people with his cricket-bat, what did he really look like, why did he let himself be blindly controlled by his mother to commit all that violence.. and what had his brutal upbringing with an abusive father resulted in (because it was his mother who had forced him to commit the murders, we were told, it wasn't his own initiative), What had made him move home to his mother suddenly? Had he lived alone all his adulthood, marked so severely by his father's deeds towards him..and how had his mother's role been in all this, earlier on? If we dug deeper into all this the novel may have become much more interesting..But then...maybe we'll get to know more about it in the next novel. If not, I think it's lame.
Sorry to be so negative. I still think the author has potential if she works more on atmosphere and depth of characters and perhaps more deep, complex plots, too. And I am grateful for her having no animal abuse & animal cruelty in the story , and that she hasn't indulged in too gory descriptions, all in all .