Missing by Karin Alvtegen: A review
One of the nice things about joining the local Mystery Book Club has been that it has introduced me to some authors who were unknown to me and whose work I probably would never have picked up except for that impetus. Karin Alvtegen is another one of those. A Swedish writer of mysteries/thrillers, she does not seem to have found as wide an audience in this country as Stieg Larsson (Who has?) or Henning Mankell, but she's good and perhaps her time will come. Alvtegen's protagonist, Sybilla, called to mind Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in some ways and so I looked at the publication dates. Alvtegen's book was originally published in 2000 in Sweden, while the first of Larsson's trilogy was published in 2005. He must have been familiar with Alvtegen' book and one wonders if he was at all influenced by it. Sybilla and Lisbeth do share some parallels. Both are anti-social loners and both had horrific childhoods that have marked them for life. Both reject society but ultim...