The Nightmare

Book excerpt: Lars Kepler returns with an internationally bestselling follow up to the wildly successful debut thriller The Hypnotist. He knows your darkest dreams. Then he makes them come true. After spellbinding audiences in The Hypnotist, Detective Inspector Joona Linna is back in The Nightmare, which has already sold 190,000 copies in Sweden just one week after publication. On a summer night, police recover the body of a young woman from an abandoned pleasure boat drifting around the Stockholm archipelago. Her lungs are filled with brackish water, and the forensics team is sure that she drowned. Why, then, is the pleasure boat still afloat, and why are there no traces of water on her clothes or body? The next day, a man turns up dead in his state apartment in Stockholm, hanging from a lamphook in the ceiling. All signs point to suicide, but the room has a high ceiling, and there's not a single piece of furniture around -- nothing to climb on.b Joona Linna begins to piece together the two mysteries, but the logistics are a mere prelude to a dizzying and dangerous course of events. At its core, the most frightening aspect of The Nightmare isn't its gruesome crimes -- it's the dark psychology of its characters, who show us how blind we are to our own motives.