Kjell Eriksson Books In Order

Publication Order of Ann Lindell Books

Chronological Order of Ann Lindell Books

Karl Stig Kjell Eriksson, more commonly known by his pen name Kjell Eriksson, was born in 1953 in Uppsala, Sweden. He is the father of three grown up children. Eriksson is a crime writer and has won the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award in 2002 given by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy for his novel The Princess of Burundi. In 2013 he won the “Ivar-Lo Prize” given by the Swedish trade union.

Kjell Eriksson is a gardener, who had his own garden center for years. He loves to grow perennial and roses. Due to his experience he knows a lot about manual labor. In the 1970s he became a trade union activist. An official agitator and negotiator for the branch of the Agricultural Workers, where he became department chairman and member of the board. At the union congress in 1976 he was a representative. In 1991 he became secretary of the SKP party.

During the 1980s he wrote articles and reports for the Swedish magazine Lantarbetaren. There he wrote about work and life as a farmer, about their dreams, concerns and happiness. In 1993, in his Forties, he started writing novels.

In his first book Knäppgöken (The Weirdo) he wrote about Uppsala from a worker’s perspective. It portraits a young farmer and the human and cultural unhealthiness. This is also a subject that often occurs in his crime stories.

He completed one more novel before starting a series of novels about a detective chief inspector from Uppsala. Her name is Ann Lindell. This series is known as Ann Lindell Mystery series. In the series Ann Lindell and her fellow detectives solve murder cases in Uppsala and the surrounding areas. The first book titled Den Upplysta stigen (Shining path) won him the “Debutant Prize” given by the Swedish Crime Academy. The Princess of Burundi is the fourth book in the series, yet it was the first to be published in English. This series consists of ten books, the last published in 2009. Seven of them were on the shortlist for the Best Crime Novel of the Year in Sweden. Foreign rights for his books have been sold all over the world.

Ann Lindell is a single mother, who loves her work and doesn’t really want to spent more than an hour a day with her son. She enjoys the interaction with her colleagues, but at times she shows a lack of consideration for others. This makes her a bit of a loner.

In the Princess of Burundi Lindell and her team have to fight the Swedish winter in Uppsala while trying to solve the case of bloody murders and complex crimes. The first murder in the book is that of John Harald Jonsson, an expert in fish aquariums. The brutality in which he has been murdered suggests that someone who really hated him, is behind it. In charge of solving this case are Ann Lindell and Ola Haver, both homicide detectives. Lindell just came back from her maternity leave.

Their first suspects are a forty-two year old man, who is troubled, as well as his family and a angry and bitter “nutcase” that had a run in with John. While the victim’s son knows about his father’s secrets and could point the police in the right direction, he doesn’t want to confide in anyone.

Jonsson, however, was only the first victim in the story. More and more citizens are murdered and the police is unable to figure out why. Vincent Hahn, a former classmate of Jonsson, comes to their attention. Hahn is a sociopath, who had has several violet confrontations. He was tormented in school by Jonsson and is looking for revenge. This quickly turns Hahn into the main suspect of the case.

Further investigation shows that Jonsson, a former thug known as Little John, had recently come to a large amount of money from a poker game. This was something he had kept hidden from his wife, only his son knew about the father’s plans. He intended to rise in society, using the gambling as a way to do so.

The Princess of Burundi is a crime novel that offers several twists and turns. It’s setting is dark and at times unnerving, able to give the reader chills.

The second translation of Kjell Eriksson’s series is The Cruel Stars of the Night. In it the the disappearance of a Italian literature professor sets things in motion. He is reported missing by his daughter. Not long after the report Ann Lindell and her team are called to the scene of a murder of an elderly farmer, Petrus Blomgren. The disappearance and the murder may be linked, but the police isn’t sure about it. Both crimes seem of a random nature and neither of them seem to have a motive. Investigation in the life of the murder victim reveal no reason why someone would want him dead.

The Thirty-Five year old daughter of the missing person, Laura Hindersten, claims that her father properly just wandered off. Soon after she thinks her father may have been murdered. She took time of work after her father went missing, but still goes into the office now and then to help out her boss. Laura, as it turns out, is a disturbed woman, having suffered when her father took out his frustration on her and her mother. He forced Laura to suppress her emotions and to become his acolyte.

Soon after the first murder, Jan-Elis Andersson, a solitary pensioner, is found dead, having been killed in the same fashion. The Violent Crime Unit is unable to link the two men together, there is no evidence that they knew each other. The team stumbles around trying to make sense of the crimes. The fact that Queen Silvia is coming to Uppsala doesn’t make things any easier for them.

Eriksson has been compared to Ed McBain and Henning Mankell. One of his trademarks is telling the story of his character’s life, as well as those of the detectives that are regular characters in the series.

In April of 2013 he started a new series, about a Commissioner Santos in Brazil.