Another Time, Another Life
Stockholm
1975: Six young people take the entire staff of the West German embassy hostage, demanding that the Baader-Meinhof members being held as prisoners in West Germany be released immediately. The long siege ends with the deaths of two hostages and the wounding of several others, including the captors.
1989: When a Swedish civil servant is murdered, the two leading detectives on the case, Anna Holt and Bo Jarnebring, find their investigation hastily shelved by an incompetent and corrupt senior investigator.
1999. Lars Johansson, having just joined the Swedish Security Police, decides to tie up a few loose ends left behind by his predecessor: specifically, two files on Swedes who had allegedly collaborated on the 1975 takeover of the West German embassy, one of whom turned out to be the murder victim in 1989. Johansson reopens the investigation and, with help from detectives Jarnebring and Holt, follows the leads-right up to the doorstep of Sweden's newly minted minister of justice.
Leif G.W. Persson is Scandinavia's most renowned criminologist and a leading psychological profiler. He has also served as an advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Justice. Since 1991, he has held the position of Professor at the National Swedish Police Board and is regularly consulted as the country's foremost expert on crime.
He is the author of ten bestselling crime novels including The Dying Detective which won both the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award for Best Crime Novel of 2010 and The Glass Key for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of 2010.
During his career Persson has been the recipient of many other prestigious awards including The Piraten Award, The Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award (which he has won three times), The Finnish Whodunnit Society's Annual Award for Excellence in Foreign Crime Writing, The Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel, and The Danish Academy of Crime Writers' Palle Rosenkrantz Prize.