Lars Kepler

"Swedish Detective Inspector Joona Linna investigates the murders of three family members whose killing was witnessed by a fourth intended victim, a traumatized child whose shock Linna hopes to penetrate through hypnotism."--NoveList.

The Hypnotist

Geoffrey Froggatt

In the frigid climate of Tumba, Sweden, a gruesome triple homicide attracts the interest of Detective Inspector Joona Linna, who demands to investigate the murders. The killer is still at large, and there's only one surviving witness, the boy whose family was killed before his eyes. Whoever committed the crimes wanted this boy to die: he's suffered more than one hundred knife wounds and lapsed into a state of shock. Desperate for information, Linna sees only one option: hypnotism. He enlists Dr. Erik Maria Bark to mesmerize the boy, hoping to discover the killer through his eyes. It's the sort of work that Bark has sworn he would never do again, ethically dubious and psychically scarring. When he breaks his promise and hypnotizes the victim, a long and terrifying chain of events begins to unfurl. This book reminded me much of the original Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. Like the original Millenium trilogy, this book was a Swedish mystery/crime fiction novel, and I found other small similarities, like a protagonist that casually cheated on his wife and a dense writing style that may be an effect of translating the original Swedish text into English. There were several passages that felt like it was meandering rather than telling the story or setting the tone, which made me apprehensive about continuing with reading the novel. I was intrigued by the story at the very beginning, but rapidly began losing interest until around the 30% mark, where it grabbed my attention again. I often have trouble following male main characters because I never find them compelling or interesting enough to justify reading from their perspective, and sadly that was the case for me here. While I do enjoy flawed and unlikable characters, I found none of the male characters to be interesting enough to keep me engaged throughout the novel. Despite being the protagonist, I found Joona to be particularly bland for the main character of a mystery/crime novel. Simone was the most interesting character to me, but sadly we’re stuck following her inept husband Erik for a big portion of the novel rather than following her. Each time we might get a taste of Simone’s perspective, the author diverts the attention to Erik. This is understandable as Erik is the titular hypnotist, but his perspective bored me. There might be some cultural differences at play or something may have been lost in translation, but Erik’s ineptitude with caring for his wife Simone after something awful happens to their son made me explicitly unsympathetic or uninterested in Erik’s character and perspective. I’m sure that the author intended for Erik’s character to be unlikable but I personally think they may have overdone it and made him significantly uninteresting in comparison to his wife’s more sympathetic character. This book also had weird pacing and sexual scenes that felt oddly placed throughout the story. This didn’t feel like a typical thriller or crime novel in the sense that I wasn’t excited or thrilled by most of what was going on. The aspect of the story revolving around Pokémon was strange and didn’t feel like it fit the tone of the story, and it felt like it didn’t add much to the story itself. One of my gripes with thriller novels is that mental illness and mental health is rarely ever done right and feels like a cheap explanation in order to justify an antagonist’s violent motives, and unfortunately this book didn’t subvert that stereotype. The exploration of the hypnotist and his former patients felt very surface level despite being the main plot of the novel. The climax and the ending could have been great but the slow slog to get there made it lose any weight and impact for me, I was entirely detached from the story by the end. I was very disappointed with this book and I wish that the tone and story lived up to the amazingly eerie book cover featuring a person obscured by shadows sitting at the top of the stairs peering down at the reader. I’m not sure if I’ll continue with the series, but if I do choose to pick up the second novel, it won’t be anytime soon.

Lori Green

I would have given it 0 stars if possible. Something must have happened in the translation to English. Sentences are short and choppy. The dialogue is childlike and the storyline rambles. I can honestly say this is the worst book I have read in the last couple of years.

YOUR MIND IS HIS PLAYGROUND. A gruesome triple homicide. There’s only one surviving witness—the boy whose family was killed before his eyes . . . and he can’t remember what happened. The police are desperate for information. Detective Joona Linna enlists the help of hypnotist Erik Maria Bark. But when Bark unlocks the secrets in the boy’s memory, he triggers a terrifying chain of events that will put all their lives in jeopardy.

A novel

Juliana Matias

Sometimes I wonder what goes through the minds of some authors while they are writing a story. They are painstakingly constructing (or trying to) a narrative that is intriguing and attention-grabbing, while pouring their hearts and souls into a story. How can they not notice what a clusterfuck it’s all adding up to be?

I should preface this by pointing out I almost did not finish this. I only did because this was this month’s pick for my book club, and I find it unnacceptable for me to show up not having finished it – I mean, how can I badmouth something I did not read? That said, I’ll try and give you guys a summary so that you do not have to fight through 500+ pages of WTF is going on here?

I can’t even remember how it begins, to be honest. Some guy is found dead and quartered in a high school somewhere, and somehow some national police guy who knows better than everyone else gets himself assigned to what is supposed to be a local case, just for kicks. The crime scene is gruesome, and turns out the family has also been attacked in their home, killing the with wife and youngest daugther, while the son survived with a crapload of stab wounds.

As the oldest daughter is MIA and feared to be the next target of the murderer, the detective decides to call up a doctor who used to be a hypnotist – but does not do that anymore – to hypnotise the semi-comatose boy into telling them what happened and how to find his sister.

If you do plan to read this book eventually, skip this part because this is gonna be full of spoilers, and I’ll see you at the end for my opinion.

SPOILER ALERT

And so it starts.

Enter the doctor who is a drug addict, living off sleeping pills so he doesn’t have to deal with his supremely resentful and insufferable wife (who can’t get over the fact that she was cheated on 10 years ago). They have a teenaged kid who has a rare blood disorder, and needs weekly injections so he won’t bleed to death.
He hypnotises the kid (the one in the hospital) because he gets off on it even though he swore he would never hypnotise anyone ever again for non-disclosed reasons. The kid confesses to murdering the entire family. But then says the older sister made him do it (?).

Cue people being shocked and multiple journalists showing up at his doorstep and putting cameras on the doctor’s son’s face because hypnosis is bullshit – and the confession was implanted by the doctor – and he is the root of all evil. ¬¬

Super detective and self-tortured-addict-doc find the sister who doesn’t wanna talk, but then does, and it turns out her little brother had been sexually assaulting her for years by threatening to kill her family. Apparently, since she said no, he made good on his promise.

This is where I should have stopped. Because, really.
But no, I am the idiot who can’t leave books unfinished.
While all these things are happening, the doc and the wife are fighting because she’s afraid he’s screwing anything that moves, while I’m fairly certain with all the pills he’s taking he couldn’t get it up to save his life. She can’t make up her mind whether to divorce him and he’s can’t muster up the strengh to give a fuck. Then again, neither could I.

Then suddenly the raping-murderous-16-year-old escapes from the hospital by killing several people unstopped. And someone completely unrelated is breaking into the doc’s apartment, drugging the wife and kidnapping the son. And the father-in-law gets involved, and they go putting their noses where they don’t belong and allow the raping-murderous kid to disappear; and then uncover this bizarre pokemon inspired gang of 6-year-olds who are involved with the son’s girlfriend mentally disabled brother and somehow the father-in-law ends up thrown in front of a bus, and later almost drowned. I know. I can’t even.
But guess what? This all has absolutely no impact on the story whatsoever. Really – you could have inserted anything else in here and it’d have had the same result.

Oh, yes, while this is happening the wife finds the time to screw some artist guy – let’s call him Plot Device #387 – whose only reason for existing is to fuck and die… but we’ll get to that.

This is when we suddenly get thrown into the past for 100 pages or so (I’m not sure – I read on my phone and there it had 1300 pages – and it felt like it). Suddenly, they decide to tell us all that happened 10 years ago. It takes soon long. Because we don’t get the important things – we get everything. Basically, the doc was screwing with people’s minds because he gets off on it for a study where he had group hypnosis therapy for abuse victims/perpetrators. The author tries to misdirect us onto focussing on a new patient who keeps getting naked, but really – they are all creepy as fuck.
And meanwhile, the doc is also getting busy with some random crazy woman who is getting possibly insider information into his research / into his pants / working on getting him to lose his medical license / marriage. Or wait, why did she do that again? Never explained – it was just another convenient plot device.

When inevitably the doc discovers that one of his creepy as fuck hypno-orgy partners patients is still torturing little kids, she pretends it never happened, tries to kill herself and sues the doctor/hospital who in conjunction with the info provided by the woman listed above uses it as a reason to fire the doc and ban him from hypnosis. 
And then he believes he was wrong along and promises on TV to never use hypnosis again.

Isn’t it wonderful? ¬¬

I mean, seriously? The whole hypnosis thing is already a bit of a stretch, but whole pubicity thing? As if people don’t have better things to do. But I digress. None of these conflicts presented will be resolved.

Suddenly we’re thrust back into present day where super detective and damaged doc are going after the misdirection attempt/10-years-ago new patient with boundary issues (who turns out is dead – though it was never explained why); father in law is running after the murdering pokemon kids (whose arc was never resolved): and wife dearest is getting fucked uncomfortably on her knees by plot device #387 who is then immediately killed by the raping-murderous kid, who showed up out of the blue while wife’s in the shower. Had you forgotten about him too? Yeah, he shows up out of the blue with his sister – stabs plot device #387, tries to stab wife and ends up stabbed by the sister.
Enough about that, somehow doc realises hey, maybe I should look at the lady that sued me out of business by blaming me for her suicidal tendencies. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that, but long before raping-murderous kid was found, super-detective had already abandoned that case and was leading the son’s abduction case. So he and doc embark on a journey to find crazy lady.

Oh, I forgot – the only reason she was able to kidnap the son was because she had told him she was his biological mother, which he believed, and promptly gave her his house key. Something that is suddenly revealed by the son’s girlfriend.

Now I can’t even try to begin to explain the clusterfuck that comes next.
They find the body of a 5-year old buried 10 years prior in her house – vindicating doc, but we never know what happens there. The son called his mom while plot device #387 was getting his throat cut, so the doc administers a magic drug that makes him wake up from the coma just for a few seconds and be able to speak to them and tell them they’re with one of the other old patients.

Super-detective, no-longer-an-addict-just-because-he-stopped-and-never-dealt-with-it-doc, and wife take a plane close to the pole, local police is unreliable, the crazy lady who cuts off people’s noses kills the patient whose house they took over, and is now only with the one who tortured political prisoners in the old Yugoslavia and some other character I have no idea where came from, but was there to attack mean lady so the son whose disorder should by now have made his blood vessels explode just by standing up
could run away.

When the cavalry eventually arrives, they are overpowered by the bad guys until son wakes up and drives a bus into the tree. Nonsense ensues – somehow son and crazy lady end up in the bus drowning in a frozen lake where doc appears with a life jacket, saves the son, and gets shot by the crazy woman before being rescued while she dies in the truck.

The end.

END OF SPOILERS

Confusing, no? All in all there are so many characters, 90% of them completely disposable, and not one even remotely likable. And so many parallel plots that are create
d becaused they are convenient and then promptly forgotten, never explained, developed or wrapped up. I just wanted it to be over, not because I cared what happened to these people whatsoever, but because it just went on and on and on.

There was an unnecessary and unexplained need to turn every kid in this book into either a murdering-raping psychopath, an evil-violent-monster, or a victim of a terrible crime – which I didn’t understand at all.
A good editor should have cut about 200-300 pages from this book, along with 70% of the characters and 90% of the supporting plots. One should not be allowed to forget about the main antagonist for 100 pages, only to have him come back and die in less than 2, and no one to even care.

In writing, more is NOT better. Making a story busy and convoluted does not hide the fact it’s shitty. If you’re in the mood for a swede thriller, do yourself a favour and pick up Stieg Larsson instead.

The hypnotist

Nadine 

Good diversion of Swedish noir / crime. A couple of sub-plots that finally resolve at the end.

The Hypnotist

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