Review - Another Time ,Another Life by Leif GW Persson

My Thanks to Lynsey at Transworld for a review copy.

Doubleday; First Edition edition (15 Mar 2012)

My Review 3 stars ***

This complicated crime thriller begins in 1975, with the Baader Meinhof storming of the West German Embassy in Sweden. Fourteen years later in 1989, a seemingly unrelated murder causes logicistical problems for Swedish detectives, Bo Jarnebring and Anna Holt. The novel then fast forwards to 1999, when Lars Johansson from the Swedish Security Police, in his endeavour to tie up some departmental loose ends, finds that there are links between all these historic events, and he enlists the help of detectives, Jarnebring and Holt, in an attempt to piece together all the jigsaw fragments of evidence.


Leif GW Persson is an established Scandinavian crime fiction writer and his ability to weave together a complicated plot is well recognised in his native country. However, I struggled to read this book, due in part to the often disorganised narrative, which I felt was something lacking in translation rather than bad writing. It took me a while to fully understand all the nuances of the story, and had to flip backwards and forwards in order to make sense of the plot.

The over complexity of both the plot, and characters made this a difficult book for me to read and enjoy.