Box 21: A Novel

By Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström

The International Thriller that Stockholm City hailed as the Best Crime Novel of the Year has finally crossed the Atlantic!

Three years ago, Lydia and Alena were two hopeful girls from Lithuania. Now they are sex slaves, lured to Sweden with the promise of better jobs and then trapped in a Stockholm brothel, forced to repay their "debt." Suddenly they are given an unexpected chance at freedom, and with it the opportunity to take revenge on their enslavers and reclaim the lives and dignity they once had. What will happen now that the tables are turned and the victims fight back?

In this masterful thriller, the celebrated team of Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström delve into the seedy underbelly of Stockholm. There we meet Lydia and Alena as they embark on a desperate plan to expose their captor and demand justice; police officers Sundkvist and Grens, on the trail of both Lydia's enslavers and Jochum Lang, a notorious mob enforcer; and Hilding Oldéus, a junkie on what might be his last—and most destructive—bender. At the Söder Hospital, their destinies begin to converge in unexpected and explosive ways.

Box 21 is a Scandinavian thriller of the highest order: a mindblowing psychological drama written with powerful intensity. When it was published in Sweden, Solo called it "suspenseful, gripping, and intelligently written . . . Almost impossible to put down," while SVT exclaimed: "Forget crime literature; this is, simply put, great literature!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9781429990028

Anders Roslund

Award-winning journalist Anders Roslund and ex-criminal Börge Hellström are Sweden’s most acclaimed crime fiction duo. Their unique ability to combine inside knowledge of the brutal reality of criminal life with penetrating social criticism in complex, intelligent plots has put them at the forefront of modern Scandinavian crime writing. In 2009, their book Three Seconds, which was awarded the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award for Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, previously won by both Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, became a top-10 bestseller in Sweden for eight months, and hit The New York Times bestseller list in the United States.

Book preview

NOW

PART ONE

MONDAY 3 JUNE

The flat was silent.

She hadn’t thought of him for a long time, or indeed of anything that belonged to that time back then. And now she was sitting there thinking about it. She thought about that last hug in the Lukuskele prison ward when she was ten years old and he had looked so small and coughed so his whole body rattled and Mum had given him a tissue, which filled with blood clots before he scrunched it up and put it in one of the big bins in the corridor.

It was the last time, but she hadn’t realised it then. Perhaps she still hadn’t taken it in.

Lydia took a deep breath.

She shook off the feeling of sadness, smiled at the large mirror in the hall. It was still early in the morning.

A knock on the door. She still had the hairbrush in her hand. How long had she been standing there? She glanced in the mirror again, her head a little to the side. Another smile, she wanted to look good. She was wearing the black dress; the dark material contrasted with her pale skin. She looked at her body. It was still a young woman’s. She hadn’t changed much since she came here, not on the outside.

She waited.

Another knock, harder this time. She should answer it. She put the hairbrush on the shelf by the mirror and took a few steps towards the door.

Her name was Lydia Grajauskas and she used to sing her name; she sang it now to the tune of a children’s song she remembered from school in Klaipeda. The chorus had three repeated lines and she sang Lydia Grajauskas for each line. She had always done this when she felt nervous.

Lydia Grajauskas

Lydia Grajauskas

Lydia Grajauskas

She stopped singing when she reached the door. He was there on the other side. If she put her ear to the door, she could quickly pick up the sound of his breathing. She knew its rhythm so well. It was him. They had met often, was it eight or maybe nine times? His smell was special. She could sense it already, the smell of him, like one of her dad’s workmates from that filthy room with the big sofa where she had hidden when she was a girl. Almost like them, a mixture of tobacco and aftershave and sweat that seeped through the closely woven material of his jacket.

He knocked for the third time.

She let the door swing open. There he was. Dark suit, light blue shirt, gold tiepin. His fair hair was short and he was suntanned. It had been raining steadily since the middle of May, but he still had a late-summer glow, as he always did. She smiled at him, the same smile as at the mirror a moment earlier; she knew he liked her to smile.

They didn’t touch each other.

Not yet.

He came in from the stairs, into the flat. She looked quickly at the hallstand and nodded at one of the coat hangers, as if to say let me take your jacket and hang it up for you. He shook his head. She guessed he was about ten years older than herself, maybe thirty-something, but it was only a guess.

She felt like singing again.

Lydia Grajauskas. Lydia Grajauskas. Lydia Grajauskas.

He raised his hand, as he always did, touched her black dress lightly, slowly sliding his fingers along the shoulder straps, across her breasts, always on top of the material.

She kept very still.

His hand traced a wide circle over one breast, then towards the other. She hardly breathed. Her chest had to be still, she must smile, must stay still and smile.

She kept smiling when he spat.

They were standing close together then; it was more like he let it go rather than spat. He didn’t usually spit in her face, instead the spittle landed in front of her feet in their high-heeled black shoes.

He thought that she was too slow.

He pointed.

One straight finger, pointing down.

Lydia knelt, still smiling – she knew he liked that. Sometimes he smiled as well. Her knees clicked a little as she pressed her legs together and went down on all fours, her face looking ahead. She asked him to forgive her. That was what he wanted. He had learnt how to say it in Russian and insisted on her getting it right, making sure she used the right words. She lowered herself in stages by bending her arms until she was almost folded double and her nose touched the floor. It was cold against her tongue as she licked the gob into her mouth, swallowed it.

Then she got up, like he wanted her to, closed her eyes and, as usual, tried to guess which cheek.

Right, probably the right one this time.

Left.

He hit her with the flat of his hand, which covered her whole cheek. It didn’t hurt that much. His arm came right round and the slap left a pink mark, but mostly it just burned. It stung only if you wanted it to sting.

He pointed again.

Lydia knew what she had to do, so the pointing wasn’t necessary, but he did it anyway, just waved his finger in her direction, wanted her to walk into the bedroom, to stand in front of the red bedspread. She went in front of him. Her movements had to be slow, and as she walked she had to absently stroke her bottom and breathe heavily. That was what he wanted. She could feel his eyes on her back, burning, his eyes already abusing her body.

She stopped by the bed.

She undid the dress, three buttons at the back, rolled it down over her hips and let it fall to the floor.

Her bra and panties were black lace, just as he wanted and he had brought them personally, making her promise to use them only for him. Only him.

The moment he lay down on top of her, she no longer had a body.

That was what she did. It was what she always did.

She thought of home, about the past and all the things she missed and had missed every single day since she came here.

She was not there, she had absented herself. Here she was just a face with no body. She had no neck, no breasts, no crotch, no legs.

So when he was rough, when he forced himself into her from behind, when her anus was bleeding, it wasn’t happening to her. She was elsewhere, having left only her head there, singing Lydia Grajauskas to a tune she had learnt long ago.

It was raining as he drove into the empty car park.

It was the kind of summer when people held their breath when they woke up and crept over to the bedroom window, hoping that today, today the sun would be beating against the slats of the venetian blinds. It was the kind of summer when instead the rain played freely outside. Every morning weary eyes would give up hope as they scanned the greyness, while the mind registered the tapping on the window pane.

Ewert Grens sighed. He parked the car, turned the engine off, but stayed in the driver’s seat until it was impossible to see out and the raindrops were a steady flow that obscured everything. He couldn’t be bothered to move. He didn’t want to. Unease crawled all over him; reluctance tugged at whatever there was to catch. Another week had passed and he had almost forgotten about her.

He was breathing heavily.

He would never truly forget.

He lived with her still, every day, practically every hour, twenty-five years on. Nothing helped, no fucking hope.

The rain eased off, allowing him a glimpse of the large red-brick villa from the seventies. The garden was lovely, almost too carefully tended. He liked the apple trees best, six of them, which had just shed their white flowers.

He hated that house.

He relaxed his grip on the wheel, opened the car door and climbed out. Large puddles had formed on the uneven tarmac and he zigzagged between them, but the wet still soaked through the soles of his shoes before he was halfway there. As he walked, he tried to shake off the feeling that life ended a little with every step he took towards the entrance.

The whole place smelt of old people. He came here every Monday morning, but had never got used to the smell. The people who lived here in their wheelchairs or behind their Zimmer frames were not all old. He had no idea what caused the smell.

‘She’s sitting in her room.’

‘Thanks.’

‘She knows you’re coming.’

She didn’t have the faintest idea that he was coming.

He nodded at the young care assistant, who had come to recognise him and was just trying to be friendly, but would never know how much it hurt.

He walked past the Smiler, a man of about his own age who usually sat in the lobby, waving cheerily as people came and went; then there was Margareta, who screamed if you didn’t pay attention to her and stop to ask how she was. Every Monday morning, there they were, part of a photograph that didn’t need to be taken. He wondered whether, if they were not lined up and waiting one morning, he would miss them, or whether he would be relieved at not having to deal with the predictability of it all.

He paused. A quiet moment outside her room.

Some nights he would wake, shaken and covered in sweat, because he had clearly heard her say Welcome when he came, she had taken his hand in hers, happy to hold on to someone who loved her. He thought about it, about his recurring dream and it gave him the courage to open the door, as he always did, and enter her space, a small room with a window overlooking the car park.

‘Hello, Anni.’

She was sitting in the middle of the room, the wheelchair facing the door. She looked at him, her eyes showing nothing remotely like recognition or even a response. He went to her, put his hand against her cold cheek, talked to her.

‘Hi, Anni. It’s me. Ewert.’

She laughed. Inappropriate and too loud as always, a child’s laughter.

‘Do you know who I am today?’

Another laugh, a sudden loud noise. He pulled over the chair that was standing by the desk she never used, and sat down next to her. He took her hand, held it.

They had made her look nice.

Her fair hair was combed, held back with a slide on each side. A blue dress that he hadn’t seen for a while, that smelt newly washed.

It always struck him how bafflingly unchanged she really was, how the twenty-five years, wheelchair-bound years in the land of the unaware, had left so few traces. He had gained twenty kilos, lost a lot of hair, knew how furrowed his face had become. She was unmarked, as if you were allowed a more carefree spirit that kept you young to make up for not being able to participate in real life.

She tried to say something as she looked at him, making her usual gurgling baby noises, which always made him feel that she was trying to reach him. He squeezed her hand and swallowed whatever it was that was hurting his throat.

‘He’s being released tomorrow,’ he told her.

She mumbled and drooled and he pulled out his hankie to wipe away the saliva dribbling down her chin.

‘Anni, do you understand? From tomorrow, he’ll be out. He’ll be free, littering the streets again.’

Her room looked just the same as when she had moved in. He had picked out which pieces of furniture she should have from home and positioned them; he was the only one who knew why it was important for her to sleep with her head to the window.

Already on the first night she had looked at peace.

He had carried her in, put her in the bed and tucked the covers round her slender body. Her sleep had been deep and he had left her in the morning when she woke up. Leaving the car there he had walked all the way to police headquarters in Kungsholmen. It was afternoon by the time he had arrived.

‘I’ll get him this time.’

Her eyes rested on him, as if she were listening. He knew this was an illusion, but because it looked right, he sometimes pretended they were having a talk the way they used to.

Her eyes, were they expectant or just empty?

If only I had managed to stop.

If only that bastard hadn’t pulled you out. And if only your head hadn’t been softer than the wheel.

Ewert Grens bent over her, his forehead touching hers. He kissed her cheek.

‘I miss you.’

The man in the dark suit with the gold tiepin, who usually spat on the floor in front of her feet, had just left. It hadn’t helped this time to think of Klaipeda and have no body, only a head. She had felt him inside her; it happened sometimes that she couldn’t shut out the pain when someone thrust themselves into her and ordered her to move at the same time.

Lydia wondered if it was his smell.

The smell she recognised reminded her of the men who sat with her dad in that dirty room full of weapons. She wondered if it was a good thing that she recognised it, if that meant that she was still somehow connected to what had been back then and which she longed for so much, or if it was just breaking down even more, that everything she could have had, and that was now so far away, was being forced deeper into her.

He didn’t speak afterwards. He had looked at her, pointed, one last time – that was all. He didn’t even turn round when he left.

Lydia laughed.

If there had been anything between her legs, she would have been aggrieved that his bodily fluids had filled it and she would have felt him inside her even more. But she hadn’t. She was just a face.

She laughed as she lathered one part of her body after another with the white bar of soap until her skin was red; she rubbed hard, pressing the soap against her neck, shoulders, over her breasts, her vagina, her thighs, feet.

The suffocating shame.

She washed it away. His hands, his breath, his smell. The water was almost painfully hot, but the shame was like some horrible membrane that would not come off.

She sat down on the floor of the shower cubicle and began to sing the chorus of the children’s song from Klaipeda.

Lydia Grajauskas.

Lydia Grajauskas.

Lydia Grajauskas.

She loved that song. It had been theirs, hers and Vladi’s. They had sung it together loudly every morning as they walked to school through the blocks of flats in the housing estate, a syllable for each step. They sang their names loudly, over and over again.

‘Stop singing!’

Dimitri shouted at her from the hall, his mouth close to the bathroom door. She carried on. He banged the wall, shouted again for her to get out of there fucking pronto. She stayed where she was, sitting on the wet floor, but stopped singing, her voice barely carrying through the door.

‘Who is coming next?’

‘You owe me money, you bloody whore!’

‘I want to know who’s coming.’

‘Clean up your cunt! New customer.’

Lydia heard real anger in his voice now. She got up, dried her wet body and stood in front of the mirror that hung above the sink, put on her red lipstick, put on the nearly cream underwear in a velvet-like material that Dimitri had handed to her that morning, sent to her in advance by the customer.

Four Rohypnol and one Valium. She swallowed, smiled at her reflection and washed the tablets down with half a glass of vodka.

She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hall. The next customer, the second of the day – a new one, someone she’d never seen before – was already waiting on the landing. Dimitri was glaring at her from the kitchen, watching as she passed him, the last few steps before opening the front door.

Before opening it she made him knock once more.

Hilding Oldéus gave the wound on his nose a good hard scratch.

The sore on his nostril wouldn’t heal. It was the heroin: whenever he shot up, it itched and scratched. He’d had a sore there for years now. It was like it was burning; he had to rub, rub, his finger digging deeper, pulling at the skin.

He looked around.

A crap room at the welfare office. He hated it, but he always came back, as soon as he got out there he was, ready to smile for a handout. It had taken him one week this time. He’d been brown-nosing the screws at Aspsås prison. Said ‘Cheerio’ to Jochum. He’d been kissing the big boy’s arse these last few months; he needed someone to hide behind, and Jochum was built like a brick shithouse. None of the lads even thought of messing with him as long as he hung out with Lang. And Jochum had said ‘see you’ back. He only had one bleeding week left. (Hilding suddenly realised he’d be out tomorrow. A week had passed: fuck, it was tomorrow.) They’d probably never meet up again outside. Jochum had protected him for a while, but he didn’t do drugs and people who didn’t just sort of disappeared, went somewhere

Reviews for Box 21

[ellenr_79 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent thriller, fast paced, complex plot, interesting characters. A seriously injured young prostitute is rescued from an apartment where it is obvious she and another have been kept locked up. When she takes hostages and makes an odd demand, they have little time to figure out what is behind it. The consequences lead them on another search for deeper and more disturbing answers.

[klockrike · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

(This review is for the Swedish version, original language)Good book about a murder in Stockholm and prostitution - well-written, detailed, but sometimes lacking in character descriptions. I loved the intricacy and ending. It felt very reality-based and seemed based on many true stories.

[murdermysterymayhem · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Craving more bleak Scandinavian crime? Box 21 is a winner! A gritty suspense novel of awkward moments, unbearable situations, sorrow, and shame.Tormented by his past detective inspector Ewert Grens is a cold-hearted workaholic obsessed with taking down Jochum Lang, a career criminal and enforcer, who years earlier stole his future. Lang is let out of a jail, once again, and this time Grens vows to put him away for life.Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva, pretty young girls from Lithuania, had their futures stolen by men who promised them a better life in Sweden, a life that now includes prostitution and enslavement.When Grens is called in to investigate the horrific beating of Lydia their futures collide testing Grens' convictions on friendship, loyality, and duty. Utterly lacking in feel good moments and redemption this book is for the serious crime/thriller fan. - Recommended

[bsquaredinoz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Box 21 is not for the faint of heart. It’s not even for the mid-strength of heart. It is strong stuff. There were things about it that I thought were excellent, one thing that didn’t work, and many things that made me very, very angry. Basically, there’s not a lot of middle ground with this book.

Though dark and extraordinarily sad the plot is quite outstanding. There are two main threads, both involving Stockholm detective Ewert Grens. In the first Grens is on the trail of Jochum Lang, a criminal of the nastiest kind who is being released from prison on the morning the book opens and Grens’ sole objective is to send him back there as soon as possible. Twenty five years earlier Lang caused an injury to Grens’ colleague (who was also his girlfriend) which resulted in massive brain damage. She has been institutionalised and unable to recognise him or communicate with him since the incident and Grens has proven pathologically incapable of recovering from the incident himself. When Lang is sent to sort out a young heroin addict who has upset Lang’s criminal bosses, Grens sees an opportunity to arrest Lang again.

The second thread is one of the saddest stories I have ever read. Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva are two Lithuanian girls who have been tricked into leaving their country for lives as whores (not the waitresses they believed they would be), the property of a man they call Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp. As the book opens the girls have been working for him for 3 years, servicing 12 clients every day and have become fractured souls in the process. On this particular day Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp beats Lydia so badly that neighbours call the police and she is hospitalised. This enables her to put her long-dreamed-of escape into action.

These threads unfold and intertwine expertly. The pace is fast, and the action credible. The ending is horrific but, in the best noir tradition, is entirely suitable. Although the violence and abysmal treatment of the two women is described in quite graphic detail it never felt gratuitous to me. There was no revelling in the descriptions here, merely a factual accounting of events and their impact that would surely make even the toughest reader weep. I have read books dealing with this theme before but none has touched me in quite the way this one did; keeping me awake, making me seethe with anger and feel impotent that there is nothing I can do about the real-world examples this fiction is surely based on.

The characters, even the minor ones, are vivid. Lydia and Alena are credible in addition to being heart-wrenching and that’s not an easy combination to achieve. But they will stay with me, especially Lydia, and her truth. Ewert Grens will, unfortunately, stay with me too. He is a self-absorbed, dysfunctional, cowardly, bigoted, hypocrite. I regularly fall in love with fictional characters but it’s very rare for me to fall in hate; Grens is an exception. While he is the worst of the bunch there isn’t a remotely decent male in the entire book, which is the only real qualm I have about it. I shy away from unintelligent generalisations about any population group and I know in my heart that all men are not the bastards they are collectively depicted as here (though I might have argued differently in the wee hours of this morning as my anger at the book’s resolution swirled around my un-sleeping brain).

I baulked at giving a book which made me feel so wretched, a book in which there is no lightness, no levity and never even the merest suggestion of a happy ending a five star-rating. But in the end I had no choice. Box 21 does everything I could ask of fiction: it transported me into another world, it introduced me to people I will never forget and it explored social issues thoughtfully and so credibly that I have lost sleep.

[bhowell_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is another good thriller from the writing team of Roslund and Hellstrom. I was lucky to have received their previous novel, "Three Seconds" from Library Thing. In Box 21 we enter the brutal world of the trafficking of young women from eastern Europe to Sweden. Promised a good life with a job, these women are then held captive as sex trade workers. One woman fights to escape and Ewen Grens is lead to the grisly scene but the adventure is just begining and the twist at the end of the book is worth waiting for..

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Having read somewhere that fans of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo would also like this book, I picked it up. It's nothing like Stieg Larsson's book at all. In his novel, there's a mystery to be had as well as a strong heroine who lives by her own inner sense of morality and never wavers. Here, what you've got is a police procedural, a story of revenge and betrayal, and at its heart, an ethical and moral dilemma. That's not to say that this isn't a good book (it is), but it's a different animal altogether than Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The main focus of this novel centers around the sex-slave trade. Young girls Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva lived in Lithuania until promises of good jobs in Sweden brought them there, only to realize the first night on the boat trip to their new home that they had been horribly misled. They find themselves locked in the rooms of a house, prisoners, kept there by a nasty piece of work named Dmitri, brutalized into submission and forced to perform twelve times a day for various regular clientele. Their situation has lasted three years and comes to a head one day, bringing the police into the situation, beginning a story that will absolutely make you cringe and want to look away as you read it. But you can't.Aside from Lydia and Alena, the main characters in the novel are policemen, especially Ewert Grens, a detective who has been obsessively gunning for a criminal named Jochum Lang who years earlier, caused Grens' partner Anni to live in a permanent state of brain damage and to be confined to a wheelchair. Grens is a puzzle to his co-workers -- his crime-solving rate is high, and he's good at his job, but since Anni's accident, he's been a loner, spending his time as a chronic workaholic, finding some solace in the music of a pop singer from the 1960s. As Grens works the case involving Lydia and Alena, he comes into possession of some information that leads him to a critical juncture both in his life and in his career. His partner, Sundqvist, can't figure out what's going on until an order from above sends him off to find out the truth.This is a dark book all the way through to the last page, which actually made my blood run cold. There are no feel-good or warm fuzzy moments here, no happy endings, and you will definitely have food for thought after you've finished. It's well written, the plotlines hang together well and all in all it is a great read.I'd recommend it to people who like Scandinavian crime fiction, or crime fiction in general on a somewhat more gritty level than the usual fare.

[jpporter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am disappointed in this book. I read 3 Seconds by the same authors, and found it to be a taut, well-structured, first-rate thriller. Box 21 is well-structured, perhaps (and I mean perhaps), but it is not as tight and engrossing as the other book. The story does bring back Supervisor Detective Investigator Ewert Grens, who in 3 Seconds was written as a curmudgeonly sort of guy, adept at police work, inept at life. Here, however, he comes off more mean-spiritedly, underhanded and simply unlikable. Story line: human trafficking involving Lithuanian girls who are tricked into coming to Sweden only to be sold into prostitution. One of the girls ends up being whipped nearly to death and then taking her revenge.A side story involves Grens' obsession with the criminal responsible for the injuries suffered by Grens' girlfriend Anni. The criminal is released from prison, and Grens is intent on putting him back behind bars forever.This is, basically, an attempt to make one novel-sized book out of two unrelated novelettes. The result is a book that really has no direction, and in which one is not able to get involved.Any remaining Ewert Grens stories have fallen way down on my reading list. A fair story, no happy ending, not even nice.

[cathyskye · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First Line: She clung to her mother's hand.If you prefer to read books which are basically positive and all turns out right in the end, you shouldn't touch Box 21 with the proverbial barge pole. However, if you like reading a book that gets its hooks in you from the very start and doesn't turn you loose until days after you've turned the last page, this is the book for you.I am a fan of Scandinavian crime fiction, so there was very little doubt that I'd be reading this book once I learned of its existence. Anders Roslund is the founder and former head of Culture News on Swedish Television, and co-author Börge Hellström is an ex-criminal who helps rehabilitate young offenders and drug addicts. They have turned what would be a few sound bites and appropriate facial expressions on the evening news into a gritty, hard-hitting and ultimately heart-breaking look into the world of sex slavery, drugs and revenge.Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva are two young Lithuanian women lured into sex slavery by the promise of good jobs in Sweden. Ewert Grens is a tough, hardened Swedish detective who's determined to put Jochum Lang behind bars for the rest of his life. (Twenty-five years ago Lang was responsible for the accident which caused permanent brain damage to Grens' wife.) Bengt Nordwall is Grens' mentor, and Sven Sundkvist is Grens' partner in the Stockholm police. Added to this mix is Hilding Oldéus, a desperate drug addict. All these characters converge at Söder Hospital.There is so much going on in Box 21 that it's difficult to talk about the book without giving too much away. I'm going to try my best to leave the plot as something for you to discover on your own. Halfway through the book, the action comes to an explosive climax, and I was puzzled. What in the world could the last half of the book be about? After the first half, it was bound to be a tremendous letdown.When I am wrong, I am spectacularly wrong.Within a very few pages, the subplots are being explored, and many more layers of character are revealed in each of the players. The book zigzags through the past and the present. The suspense continues to build as do nuance and detail. Although the plot of Box 21 settles down, more or less, into a straight line, the ending is one that's going to shock many readers.As I read this book, I couldn't help but be reminded of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series. Here, too, the abuse of women is a fundamental theme. But where Larsson's series gives the reader a glimmer of hope for the future because of characters who continue to fight for right against the odds, Box 21 seems to hold no hope. All the characters seem shrouded in the perpetual gloom of bad choices, cynicism and evil.I found Box 21 to be totally engrossing in plot, pacing, characterization, setting, detail-- many times I felt as though I were a passenger in a plane that was about to crash-- and only two small details kept it from being a "Wow!" book for me. The first fifty pages or so read awkwardly, and it took me a while to become familiar with the cadence and phrasing. (No translator is listed for the book.) The other small detail? The end didn't shock me. Sometimes I'm more cynical than I'd like to be.Box 21 is grim. It's brutal. It certainly isn't pretty. It is compulsive reading, and the cynical side of my nature has the feeling that its story is much closer to truth than fiction in the worlds of addiction, victimization and revenge.*Review copy provided by the Amazon Vine program.

[Missie Sexton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So terrifying because it is fiction that mirrors life! Page turner!

[AndreaParksville · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well written and I never expected the conclusion! Good read.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

adult crime fiction. Reading very much like Stieg Larsson's trilogy, here is another suspenseful read from a Scandinavian author. I didn't like it as much because it doesn't have the strong female character that triumphs in the end (well, depending on how you look at it), but it will keep readers satisfied for a couple of days--the amount of time it takes to finish it.