Product Description

Winner of the Swedish Crime academy Award for Best Crime Novel, "The Princess of Burundi" introduces readers to a leading crime writer from Sweden whose work has created an international sensation. Eriksson's U.S. debut opens a week before Christmas when a Swedish town is rocked by the brutal murder of John Jonsson, a local family man. Detectives, led by a very pregnant Inspector Ann Lindell, at first suspect a chillingly well-drawn psychotic, and they may be right. But if they are not right, that leaves a cunning and vicious murderer on the loose in their town...A page-turner from start to finish, "The Princess of Burundi" catapults Eriksson to the top ranks of international crime fiction writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65985 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"Riveting.... THE PRINCESS OF BURUNDI resembles the books of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, not to mention those of the modern master Henning Mankell." The Wall Street Journal"

Customer Reviews

Good Addition to Genre
I received this as a present from my wife recently and munched through it this week. Although there isn't a character in it as interesting as Inspector Wallender, the writer has plotted an excellent crime story with some likeable characters. There are some interesting musings on modern Sweden and the loss of certains ways of life. I must complain about Amazon's plot synopsis. Ann Lindell is at no point pregnant in this story rather she has already had her kid! It this a hint that the translations of Eriksson's books will be out of sequence like so many of these Scandinavian writers viz Mankell, Jo Nesbo etc?

Yet another Swedish murder, slow-burning at that.
There ought to be a law against over-dramatised blurbs on books. In Kjell Eriksson's The Princess of Burundi (for some reason, several of this man's crime novels have an African reference in their titles), the blurb talks about a silent killer who holds an entire city in the grip of his terror. Nonsense. Other than the relatives of the man who is killed, nobody in Uppsala really gives a damn. His brother is out for revenge, his lovely wife is ravaged by grief, his son is falling apart as a result of it all. It is sombre and dark as almost all of Scandinavian crime fiction, and is rather good as a study of the effects of violent crime on a family. Why was the man killed? There are rumours of a large winnings at poker; although he has been on the straight-and-narrow for years, his brother (to whom he was very close) has continued a life of crime; was it revenge? The book is rather slow to take off, and the solution when it finally arrives is not very satisfying, but the book adds yet another dimension to one's understanding of Swedish life, which is all to the good, what?

Enjoyable read - good characters, plotting weaker
i thought eriksson created some very strong and realistic characters in Princess of Burundi which helped compensate for a storyline that left a few gaps in the plotting and a solution that was slightly fortuitous. The atmosphere created by the death of "Little John" is sympathetically portrayed - unlike many detective books where such tragedies are trivialised - in this book we see the effects on his wife, son and brother. eriksson does go into a lot of background detail about characters but not in an obviously "documentary" way, so we do feel empathy - similar to Mankell's Wallendar books. The procedural stuff isn't overdone and if some of the meetings in the police station seem a little too deep and philosophical to be realistic, it is an interesting analysis of the state of modern sweden. very readable. 3 1/2 stars