A review by tobinlopes
Three Seconds by Anders Roslund

3.0

I found this book through my reading Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. The authors, and this book, won the same prize Larsson did. I wasn't expecting another Salander character but the same flavor of narrative and, mostly, I wasn't disappointed. The book moves well and I was utterly involved until a pivotal plot point occurred, without any explanation of the motivation behind the character's actions. I was pretty disgusted because I thought it might be a cop out in order to move to the more exciting part. Then I realized something.



My love and immersion in U.S. crime drama in books and T.V. (but not L&O...eeeesshhh) gave me a fairly deep picture on how Americans handle crime. What I realized was that the Swiss do things differently than we do - WOW huh? ;) It's normally not a big deal but I think in the case of this story it suffers from translation. What was such a BIG deal in Sweden was not such a big deal here, and was a critical plot point that was weakened in the U.S.



The story was still strong and the two main characters were pretty awesome. I gave it a 7/10 on my scale.



-tpl