When we first meet police officer Leo Junker it's the end of summer, a summer Leo has spent isolated in his apartment — exactly why, we don't know. He is sitting on a bench near the apartment building where he grew up, in a rough suburb of Stockholm. He is so close to what used to be his home, yet more lost than he has ever been. While he sits there, he is unaware of the fact that, in a matter of hours, someone is going to be killed. And it is going to be because of him.
In the first book of the Leo Junker series, we meet a protagnoist who is adrift. He has ended a long-term relationship, is shut off from his job, and lacks every sense of meaning. Over the course of the series, as Leo is faced with trial upon trial, his true challenge lies not in solving the crimes set before him, but in searching for belonging. In finding his way home.
I am a child of both the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon crime literature traditions. When I write, I want to thrill you and scare you, make you laugh and entertain you like only a good crime novel can. But I also want to push the boundaries of the genre and exploit the unexplored potential that it still holds in order to talk about society at large and the people who live in it. As a criminologist, the motivations behind crimes interest me more than the crimes themselves. And so, my books are about the why rather than the what. And, most of all, they are about the who.
With Leo Junker, I wanted to create a story about a complex and contradictory human being, a police officer teetering on the edge of the law, crippled by both trauma in the past and bad judgment in the present. Although Leo can't let go of the crimes he must investigate, his obsession isn't due to some deep sense of duty; Leo is haunted by the crimes because they in some way seem to be about him.
Also, behind the immediate drama of the investigations at hand in each book is a bigger mystery extending far back into the past, concealed in coils of fog and smoke. A mystery that can only be sensed in the first book, but that, over the course of the series, will develop into something spectacular involving politics on the highest level.
This is Leo Junker. I invite you into the complicated and thrilling world in which he stumbles — and falls.
