Sixteen-year-old Roger has vanished. Days pass and Västerås Police do nothing, blaming his disappearance on teenage antics. Then Roger’s pale, mutilated body is found floating in a shallow marshland pool, his heart missing, and the experts descend.

They need Sebastian Bergman: widower, psychologist, top criminal profiler and one of Sweden’s foremost experts on serial killers. Since losing his wife and child Sebastian has become numb to the outside world and has no interest in taking on the murder case – until he is blindsided by a secret from his past. Desperate for access to confidential police files, he agrees to join the investigation and it’s not long until the brittle web of lies and deception seizes his full attention…

I enjoyed Hans Rosenfeldt’s novel ‘Cry Wolf‘ and his Nordic Noir TV series ‘The Bridge‘ so I was expecting good things of ‘Sebastian Bergman’ and I wasn’t disappointed. 

The plot was a marvelous construction: dark, twisty, surprising and revealed at a pace that maximised the tension. All of that wasamplified by the well-defined characters of the police officers investigating the murders and by a deep understanding of what grief does to people.

The character of Sebastian Bergman, was the icing on the cake. He’s an easy man to dislike: arrogant, transactional, sociopathic. Not surprisingly perhaps, he’s also an easy man to believe in. I admired that the authors didn’t let him become any more likeable as the book went on but they did help me understand how he came to be who is. 

Sometimes, Swedish books translated into English have a muted feel to them, as if I’m seperated from the story by a thin sheet of glass. ‘Sebastian Bergman’ wasn’t like that. It was engaging, nuanced and fluent.

The title of the original Swedish version of this book was ‘Det fördolda‘ which translates as ‘The Hidden‘. In the US, it was released as ‘Dark Secrets’. I think both titles are a better fit for the story than ‘Sebastian Begrman‘. Bergman is a key character in the story but the power of the story comes from an ensemble cast and from the depth and complexity of the deceptions that the investigating team have to tackle to solve the murders. 

I suspect that this book was retitled to match the name of the TV Swedish TV adaption. Here’s the trailer

There are another seven books in this series and I’m looking forward to reading them.