The Hand That Trembles

(The fourth book in the Ann Lindell series)

This blurb is not about Kjell Eriksson's book. Please lift your game YPRL.

This is book #8 in a series of 10, of which 3 earlier ones also have been translated into English. I’ve read all three and they’re variable, but all are better than this one. For one thing, a translation needs a strong editor but this book clearly didn’t get one for at least its first half. So names get mixed up, sentences get their meaning twisted, the grammar’s sometimes wrong or at least clumsy. And the stuff that was put in to make Americans more comfortable is annoyingly inconsistent (some temperatures stayed in Celsius while others are marked as Fahrenheit and still others are apparently in Fahrenheit without being marked as such). But at least they didn’t change the original distances in metres to distances in feet. Why do Americans read foreign books if they can’t cope with things that are not American? But worse than the messy translation is the fact that the story doesn’t really get started until around page 100 and by page 125 I had already guessed the outline of the last 200 pages without trying. But I still found it to be a reasonably good story, though there’s too much pondering about the main investigator’s love life or absence of one. The last two books in the series, #9 and #10, have not been translated yet. One hopes those two books are better and that the translator either changes or shapes up.