Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and has been one of the most popular fiction series of recent years. Crime books set in modern day Sweden, the books feature complex and dynamic central characters, compelling and tangled plots full of thrilling twists and turns that credit the Millenium Trilogy as having spawned the “Nordic Noir” genre.
If you enjoyed the series, then try these other “Nordic Noir” choices.
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Description: A Norwegian crime drama detailing corruption, a bitter loner cop, and a tale that reaches all the way back to World War II.
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Description: Investigating the unsolved disappearance of his grandson who vanished in 1972, Gerlof and his daughter Julia are led to to some startling revelations about their isolated island community.
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Description: When writer Erica Falck returns to her hometown after the funeral of her parents, she finds her childhood friend Alex murdered. Has she killed herself, or in this isolated community, is there a darker explanation?
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Description: Laura Hindersten goes to the Upsalla police to report that her father, a local professor, is missing. Inspector Ann Lindell can find no explanation for the man’s disappearance, and when the corpses of two elderly men do turn up, neither of the dead men is the missing academic….
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Description: A young teacher is ruthlessly shot one evening as he comes in from the gym. That night, his parents are also killed by the same gunman in a nearby village. Detective Inspector Irene Huss and colleagues are called in.
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Description: Annie and her daughter, Mia arrive in Blackwater, Sweden on Midsummer Eve 1974, planning to join a local commune and happen upon the bodies of two people who have been brutally murdered. Eighteen years later, Annie meets the man she saw fleeing the murder site that night, but he is now her daughters boyfriend…
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Description: As one of Stockholm’s homeless, Sybilla Forsenstrom takes each day as it comes. After she charms a susceptible businessman into paying for her dinner and room, his dead body is discovered and Sybilla becomes the prime suspect.
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Description: Smilla is a smart, cynical, fashionable Greenlandic immigrant living in Denmark who, despite her general dislike of people, becomes very close to her young neighbor Isaiah. When Isaiah dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Smilla is determined to learn the truth.
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Description: The plot centers on Annika’s investigations into Communist and Socialist protests and terror attacks of the 1960s and ’70s; one of her contacts is killed, and his death turns out to be just one of many.
Henning Mankell Inspector Kurt Wallander Series
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo Martin Beck Police Mysteries