Camilla Läckberg & Henrik Fexeus (2023) Cult

Camilla Läckberg & Henrik Fexeus’s Cult (2023) has sold more than 30 million copies. I like to say I’d read it, but I haven’t. I read around a fifth. The first 100 pages.

For the record. My combined book sales lie about 3 copies, or more, maybe 4. Nordic noir is the new ABBA.

Ossian is the kidnapped five year old boy whose disappearance drives the central plot. Frederik & Josefin, Ossian’s parents, are devastated by the abductor being a woman that said she had puppies in her car. Some other kid are nursery remember this. Hmmm?

Kungsholmen Police Team are called in to investigate. There’s been a previous abduction that ended in a child’s death. That’s the ticking clock.

The detectives— Peter, Ruben, Julia, and Christer— are a collection of mental-health symptoms such as the sex-pest detective (reformed), the mother who has just had a baby but it made to feel guilty about coming back too soon,  and at the centre an on-off love affair between a mismatched couple. protagonists: Mina Dabiri, a traumatised detective battling severe OCD, and Vincent Walder, a mentalist whose obsession with patterns makes him inadvertently the main narrator with his paramour.

Walder’s show seemed to me a close-fit with Derren Brown. ‘Award winning master of mind control and psychological illusion’. Walder’s show seems pretty close to what I saw Brown doing on the telly.

Back to the backstory, Walder is unhappily married after dumping the women he was supposed to marry for her wee sister, he’s also really got a thing for Dabiri. Derren Brown wouldn’t have, because he’s gay. So they’re not really that much the same.

Dabiri, of course, has an estranged daughter. Nathalie knows nothing of her mother. Her wealthy father brings her up. But when her beautiful granny turns up with the poisoned apple of a cult-deprogramming cult, Epicura based on the Greek ideal of hedonism (or something similar, ask Derren Brown, he loves Greek philosophy but favours the Stoics).

It took 100 pages of backstory to get to the main story. You might want to read it. Being a hedonist, I’ll not torture myself. Or is that me being stoical? Read on?