This, the first of six stories featuring amateur detective Puck Ekstedt, opens with a colleague inviting her to join him and a group of friends to celebrate midsummer at his house on a remote island. Everybody seems to be having fun until two more women turn up uninvited. Tempers raise, threats are made and then Puck finds one of them dead in the woods. She tells one of the Eji, who she is apparently in a relationship with, and they return to the mainland and he contacts a friend who is a policeman. The three of them return to the island but when they get there, there is no sign of the dead woman! The others believe that she left the island but each seems to think somebody else took her. When the boat breaks down there is no way to contact the mainland and another member of the group is killed, Puck and policeman Christer Wijk will have to solve the crimes alone.
After Scandinavian mysteries like 'Wallander', 'The Bridge' and 'The Killing' this fifties-set series seems surprisingly bright in comparison. It also feels lighter in town; one of the characters even remarks that it is getting like Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians' and I'm sure many viewers will have though the same when the group headed off to a remote island with no telephone contact to the mainland. As is the way with such mysteries there were plenty of suspects and each of them seems to have a motive. I was a little surprised at just how much the policeman figured out; it made a change from a story where he is just there to provide theories that can be proved wrong by the heroine although in the final scene where the killer is revealed that did happen. The acting was fairly solid although I did have to rely on the English subtitles to understand what was being said. Overall this was a decent first story in the series; it will be interesting to see how the rest of the series goes.
After Scandinavian mysteries like 'Wallander', 'The Bridge' and 'The Killing' this fifties-set series seems surprisingly bright in comparison. It also feels lighter in town; one of the characters even remarks that it is getting like Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians' and I'm sure many viewers will have though the same when the group headed off to a remote island with no telephone contact to the mainland. As is the way with such mysteries there were plenty of suspects and each of them seems to have a motive. I was a little surprised at just how much the policeman figured out; it made a change from a story where he is just there to provide theories that can be proved wrong by the heroine although in the final scene where the killer is revealed that did happen. The acting was fairly solid although I did have to rely on the English subtitles to understand what was being said. Overall this was a decent first story in the series; it will be interesting to see how the rest of the series goes.
