FOREIGN RIGHTS
AGENCY
FIRST EDITION MANAGEMENT
Christine Edhäll och Kaisa Palo
THE HIGH COAST SERIES
We Know You Remember (Rotvälta) was published in Sweden in October 2020. Awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the year by Swedish Crime Writer’s Academy, and won the Glass Key award for Best Nordic crime Novel 2021. The second novel in the series, You will never be found (Slukhål) was published in Sweden October 2021.
Right sold to: US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Israel, Japan, Spain, Brazil, China and Taiwan.
Film- and TV rights optioned by John Wells Productions.
The third novel in the series Djuphamn (The deeper you go) will be published in Sweden May 2023.
In the small mining community of Malmberget, north of the Arctic Circle, houses are being moved from the ground that’s quaking and cracking. The mine is swallowing up the town piece by piece, and people’s memories have collapsed into the huge pit named “the hole”. Only a few people still cling to their homes, persistently refusing to leave. Two workers making the last preparations before moving a house hear a sound from the basement. Could it be an animal? When they break one of the cellar windows, they find a terrified man curled up in a corner.
In Ådalen, 700 kilometers away, another man is found dead, starved to death, in a deserted house in the woods.
Police officer Eira Sjödin is thrown into the investigation.
Back home, Eira is packing up her mother’s belongings to move her into a nursing home for people with dementia. She tries to clear out her childhood home, and her memories. Her brother is in prison in Umeå, sentenced for manslaughter, a crime he has confessed but not committed. Eira has several loose flings to try to stifle her loneliness, but she is wholly unprepared for the feelings she begins to develop for GG, who is twenty years her senior – and her boss.
One morning GG doesn’t show up for work. Not the next day either.
In the dramatic second instalment of the High Coast Series, Eira Sjödin finds herself at the mercy of an elusive perpetrator – and of a love she can no longer deny.
A country road winds through blue-tinged mountains, a river smooth as a mirror stretches out like a second sky. Olof Hagström is driving south along the northern coast of Sweden when he makes an impulsive turn into the small town where he grew up, a place he hasn’t stepped foot in over twenty years. Outside his childhood home, something is amiss. A dog barks relentlessly inside, and water is running down the dilapidated façade. Olof searches under a familiar stone: the key is where he remembered. Inside the house he discovers a panicked dog, a terrible stench, water pooling on the floor. Olof draws back the shower curtain in the bathroom and finds his father, a man he has not seen or spoken to in nearly two decades. He is dead.
Police investigator Eira Sjödin has recently left Stockholm to return to her childhood home in the Ådalen region of Northern Sweden in order to care for her aging mother who is slipping into dementia. When Eira is sent to investigate the suspicious death of an elderly man, nightmares from her childhood come flooding back. Eira was only nine years old when a teenage Olof Hagström was found guilty of raping and murdering a local girl named Lina Stavred, but the case left a wound in the town’s collective memory and tinged Eira’s own upbringing with fear. Olof Hagström was only fourteen years old at the time, and too young to be sentenced. But when he was sent to a youth home, his family severed all ties with him and Olof was never seen in the town again. Until now.
Did Olof kill his father Sven? Eira Sjödin begins a search for Sven Hagström’s killer that will lead her back to the Lina-case. What she finds will shake the town, and her own family, to the core. A missing girl, a hidden body, a decades-long cover-up, and old sins cast in new light.
Uprooted is the first book in a new crime fiction series by Tove Alsterdal.
previous stand-alone crime novels
The Forgotten dead
Kvinnorna på stranden
Published in Sweden 2009. No 1 bestseller in Denmark and Iceland (2011/2012), and appointed 5th best literary book of the year in Denmark 2011. Shortlisted for Prix du Balai de la Dècouverte as best first crime novel of the year in France 2012 and for Prix des lecteurs at Ancres Noir, France, 2014.
Rights sold to: UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Japan, Israel and China.
A young woman is the sole survivor from an overloaded dingy carrying refugees across the Mediterranean. In the dead of night, she makes her way into a harbor in southern Spain, disoriented and afraid. In the next cove, a Swedish tourist wakes at dawn from a romantic encounter on the beach and finds a black man dead in the water – yet another supposed African migrant in the waves of anonymous dead washing up onto European shores.
In New York, scenographer Ally Cornwall has just learned she’s pregnant. Her beloved husband Patrick, a highly acclaimed investigative journalist, is in France working on a story about human trafficking. When Ally can’t get hold of Patrick to share her good news, she begins to get worried. One day a package arrives for her from Patrick, postmarked a week earlier. Inside are his field notes and blurry photos of men in suits, along with a cryptic message to store the documents for safekeeping. Something is wrong, she knows it. Harboring both panic and their child inside her, Ally boards a plane to Paris. Now she must follow the meager clues she has in order to trace Patrick’s footsteps, which lead her from the corridors of powerful men to rundown safe houses for African migrants being held as modern-day slaves, and finally to a truth more devastating than she could ever have imagined.
Beautifully written and breathlessly paced, The Forgotten Dead is a complexly woven puzzle of a story that exposes the sordid underbelly of our globalized world, where human lives are nothing but commodities to be bought and sold and where dark forces will stop at nothing to earn profit.
Buried in Silence
I TYSTNADEN BEGRAVD
Published in Sweden January 2012. Appointed the second best crime novel of the year in Sweden. Shortlisted as best crime novel of the year in the Netherlands 2013. Winner of Prix du Balais d’or 2017 and Ancres Noir 2018, both in France.
Rights sold to: Germany, Netherlands, France, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Finland and China.
When a recluse named Lars-Erkki Svanberg is found brutally murdered with an axe, the small town of Kivikangas in the borderland between Sweden and Finland is rattled to its core. Who would do such a thing to a former cross-country ski legend, an elderly man who has kept to himself for years? In a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, no one wants to imagine that there may be a cold-blooded killer next door.
Thore Palo is a retired policeman who knows everything that has happened in Kivikangas – past and present. He also happens to be a friend of the late Lars-Erkki Svanberg. Though it’s been years since he left the force, the death of his friend prompts Thore to start making his own inquiries about the case.
London-based journalist Katrine Hedstrand has returned to the Stockholm suburb where she grew up in order to care for her aging mother Ingrid, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. When attempting to settle Ingrid’s affairs, Katrine stumbles across a letter from a real estate agent with an offer: someone is prepared to pay an exorbitant amount of money for a ramshackle homestead in the far north of Sweden that Katrine didn’t even know existed. And so opens a door to her mother’s hidden past which hints at the grandfather Katrine never knew by name, and the stern politics of small-town secrets – in which Thore Palo plays a key role. Katrine sets off on an odyssey that will take her from Kivikangas to St. Petersburg in the search for a truth about her roots that has been buried in silence.
As the long-forgotten tale of Katrine’s family unfolds, she uncovers ties that reach across the border and back in time, to the Soviet Union and the young men and women who left their homes to build a new life in the great country in the East. When it turns out that the murdered Lars-Erkki Svanberg also had a mysterious offer to buy his family homestead, Katrine realizes that the tentacles of time stretch into the present, where silence may be worth killing for.
Part nail-biting whodunit, part epic family drama, Buried in Silence is a thrilling tale about the ties that bind people together over borders and generations – despite the forces fighting to keep them apart.
The disappeared
låt mig ta din hand
Published in Sweden August 2014. Awarded Best Crime novel of the year in Sweden 2014. Shortlisted for Glasnyckeln, The Glass Key, as best Nordic Crime Novel 2014. Shortlisted for Elle Prix de Lectrices, France 2018.
Rights sold to: Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Israel and China.
A homeless man witnesses a young woman exiting a nightclub together with an aggressive man. That same night, Charlie Eriksson falls to her death eleven stories down. The tragedy bears clear signs of suicide, and the police write the whole thing off.
Helene, a successful architect, has left her chaotic past behind – or so she thinks. But when her sister Charlie dies, the carefully constructed façade crumbles. Helene learns that Charlie traveled to Argentina shortly before her death. The same country where their own mother went missing in the 70’s – perhaps as one of the disappeared in the Argentine military junta’s purge? Now Helene must travel to Argentina in search of the answers that may have gotten both her mother and sister killed.
The Disappeared is a captivating thriller that weaves a complex and lyrical story about love and loss – and how the past continue to cast shadows over the present.
Do not turn around
vänd dig inte om
Published in Sweden August 2016. Number One in Swedish bookstores for two months following the release of the paperback in spring 2017.
Rights sold to: Germany, Netherlands, France, Denmark and Norway.
Svante Levander is brutally stabbed to death on the rolling grounds of the former mental institution Beckomberga, now an exclusive suburban housing development. His ex-wife Eva finds herself the primary suspect. Eva may be emotionally unstable, but is she a killer?
Eva begins a searchfor the missing Roma woman who may have witnessed the murder and can clear her name. Her journey takes Eva from underground clubs in Berlin to the slums of Bucharest. Meanwhile, back at Beckomberga, a group of young boys make
a shocking discovery: human remains buried close to the crime scene. Are they connected to Svante’s murder? Or are they related to the hushed-up history of the Beckomberga mental institution? The police rev up a hunt for what may be a serial killer, while the residents of the park create vigilante groups to defend themselves.
Demons from the past stalk the present in this evocative thriller about obsession, insanity, and the hidden realities of lives lived between society’s cracks.
Erasure
blindtunnel
Published in Sweden January 2019.
Rights sold to: Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Russia, Poland, Israel, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
Buried tunnels. Cries echoing underfoot. The blood of a repressed history running through your neighbour’s veins…
Sonja and Daniel are an established middle-aged couple who, in a last attempt to save their failing marriage, decide to leave Sweden and follow their dream of buying a vineyard. When Daniel finds a dilapidated estate in Bohemia in the Czech Republic, an area also known as Sudetenland, they buy the property and one-way tickets to a new life.
One night, Daniel wakes Sonja and leads her down into the house’s deep basement. He has found an opening to a hidden tunnel. As they climb inside, they find themselves in an old wine cellar filled with dusty bottles. Sonja wanders further into the tunnel where she makes a frightening find: the mummified corpse of a young boy. His clothes are dated and he wears a white armband. In his pocket is a German Reichsmark from 1943. The local police don’t want to dig further into the case.
As her life unravels around her, Sonja starts digging into what happened in the area at the end of the Second World War. She realizes she may have stumbled upon something that people are willing to kill to keep hidden.
History and present intertwine in a riveting tale about human brutality – and loyalty. In a town without mirrors, the past may be erased but the departed will not be forgotten. The living carry the dead in this exceptionally atmospheric suspense novel. With Erasure, Tove Alsterdal offers a new perspective on a history we all thought we knew and asks the question: to what ends will we go to save ourselves and the memories of those we love?
