Swedish sleepwalker thriller a grisly cut above

Goodness gracious — the Swedes do like their murder mysteries to be brutal and gory and long.

When The Widow strikes, as she does often, she unleashes her axe in a frenzy, only getting around to chopping off what’s left of the victim’s head when every other body part has pretty much been hacked to pieces, limbs scattered here, there and everywhere, blood spatters galore.

That’s your thing? Then read on.

The Sleepwalker, published in late July in translation here, was not only the top-selling murder mystery in Sweden in 2024, it was the top-selling fiction novel of any kind in the country, boasts the publisher, and has now been optioned for Apple TV+, with Liev Schreiber as ace Stockholm police detective Joona Linna.

This is the 10th Linna novel by authors Lars Kepler (a pseudonym for husband-and-wife authors Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril), and Linna himself is quite the piece of work, a gun-toting Dirty Harry who inflicts exceptional violence while his sidekicks often get to suffer the same.

The sleepwalker, lower case, is Hugo, a sullen, rude, chip-on-both-shoulders 17-year-old who’s been seriously sleepwalking since he was able to walk — there’s lots of medical babble to explain how it’s real.

His father is a famous author, his mother was a drug addict who went back home to Quebec to get clean, but has stopped writing to Hugo. Dad is married to Agneta, an African who’s underemployed in multimedia and whom Hugo rejects. Hugo is involved with a woman twice his age, who has some kind of shady work at night; they’re saving up to go looking for Hugo’s mom.

And off Hugo goes sleepwalking one night, waking up in a caravan camp he went to as a child, lying on a severed arm amid a charnel house of body parts which all add up, more or less, to one former man.

After more mayhem, intricately described in chop-by-chop, sever-by-dismember detail, the police realize Hugo is much more likely a potential witness than a killer.

As the carnage continues, Linna turns to a hypnotist pal who convinces Hugo’s father and the doctor running a creepy sleep clinic to try hypnosis; Hugo has frequent nightmares about murder and freaks out when he’s coached to separate his nightmares from the murder he may just have seen. Golly, after a lot of chapters, think he’ll remember anything?

The police reckon The Widow doesn’t approve of infidelity, sharpening her axe in anticipation. When married people stray, the sex is described in as much salacious detail as the slaughter.

OK, we’ll tell about just one ill-fated infidelity, maybe intriguing to your book club: a husband and wife sneak off in their separate cars to a hotel room with their lovers; it’s one hotel room, it’s the same couple, the husband and wife adopting personas as completely different wild-and-crazy people, enjoying four hours in which they, um, er, (blush) do happy things, then go separately back home.

But The Widow doesn’t approve.

As the corpse count climbs, Linna sleuths clue after clue, producing tense showdowns which — oops — turn out to be red herrings, yet nonetheless bloody. What are the chances?

We learn that in Sweden, when a police officer kills someone, or police officers get killed by the villain, that everything apparently just continues normally. No one goes on leave or to a desk job while killings are investigated, no one gets checked out for PTSD, no compulsory time with a therapist, not even any paperwork. Reload your gun — come on, your shift’s not over.

There’s a subplot about men doing unspeakable things to trafficked boys on drugs, there’s a SWAT commander with a tough home life, a budding romance in the sleep clinic — you need lots of subplots to get north of 500 pages, even with so many murders.

The whodunit and the why aspects of The Sleepwalker are pretty nifty. It’s a given in Scandinavian noir that the police detective may be just as much of a mess as the villain, and you can’t count on all the good people to be still breathing and intact on the last page.

There’s genuine suspense as The Widow closes in on victims, or as scared cops close in in dark, spooky places.

Many have bought The Sleepwalker. So much terror, so much pain, so many ghastly deaths. Revel.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons that anyone giving a less-than-stellar review of a bestseller about an axe murderer might be accused of doing a hatchet job.