Anders Roslund

Grens & Sundkvist book #6

This is a bleak tale of teen gang running amok.

Stockholm is being terrorized by a teenage gang’s reign. The crime wave is being directed from inside a maximum security prison by an 18 year old named Leon. His blood brother Gabriel’s girlfriend Wanda regularly smuggle in pills as a mule. The gang has no reservation about recruiting 12 years old ....and the book goes on. I suggest you read the synopsis to get a better idea what you’ll be into....I lost interest and abandoned it before I reached to end...Now did I bailed out too fast? Maybe.

The premise of this book sounded so good that I finally brought it up from my very long TBR list to give it priority. Frankly it should have stayed at the bottom even forgotten. The beginning is very disjointed and difficult to follow. I had a hard time getting into a narrative that is not told in chapters but in short clips of a page or two where we have point of view that changes on a wimp. This choppy narrative and the merry-go-round changing point of view are very confusing.

“Two Soldiers” is a difficult 600 pages read that focusses on the street gang, it is raw and brutal.

This is one book that will indeed divide readers.....It was far from being my cup of tea...… (more)

This novel is divided into five parts, and the first two were rather slow going. There is a rather elaborate setup, necessary to the fast pacing of the last two parts, but I almost lost patience. I also haven’t read anything by these two authors, so the character development of their detective Ewert Grens was rather lost on me. I suspect fans wouldn’t find the first parts as tedious as I did. But by the third part, the pace picked up and the setup began to pay off.
I was a little disoriented by how seriously the Swedish legal system seemed to take the coverups required to use police informants. Then I was a little ashamed that we in the United States don’t give it a second thought. As the prosecutor says, “Criminals working for the police. Criminals’ own crimes being covered up and downplayed. One crime is legitimized so that another one can be investigated. Policemen who lie and withhold the truth from other policemen. Damn it, Grens, in a democratic society.”… (more)