Product Description

Sybilla Forsenstrom doesn't exist. For fifteen years she has been excluded from society and, as one of the homeless in Stockholm, she takes each day as it comes, keeping all her possessions in her rucksack - apart from a knife and salami which she stores in a smart briefcase. She is always well-dressed and displays impeccable manners. One night, in The Grand Hotel, she charms a susceptible businessman into paying for her dinner and room. His dead body is discovered the following morning and Sybilla becomes the prime suspect. When a second person is killed in similar circumstances, she becomes the most wanted person in Sweden.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #732012 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-26
• Original language: Swedish
• Binding: Hardcover
• 249 pages

About the Author
KARIN ALVTEGEN (b. 1966) is regarded as the most exciting new crime writer in Scandinavia. Missing was awarded the premier Scandinavian crime writing award and was also nominated for the Poloni Award and Best Crime Novel 2000 in Sweden. Alvtegen lives in Stockholm. Her great aunt was Astrid Lindgren.

Customer Reviews

Homeless, but not a victim...
Karin Alvtegen is the niece of Astrid Lindgren, but this is not a tale involving pigtails in any shape or form. Instead this gripping crime novel gives us an in-depth portrait of the life of Sibylla Forsenstrom, a homeless Swedish woman.
Sibylla's ambition is someday to have a sanctuary, a home of her own, and she is assiduously saving money to reach this goal. Her plans for the future are thrown into disarray when she is framed for a murder that she didn't commit. With the help of a schoolboy, Patrik, who becomes her friend when he discovers her sleeping in the attics of his school, Sibylla turns detective and solves the crimes. The author sensitively handles the traumas in Sibylla's background, and it is a relief to find a crime novel that doesn't automatically relegate a homeless person to the role of murder victim.

Excellent thriller
Sibylla Forstenstroem is the daughter of a rich but insensitive merchant and his wife. After a depression and an unwanted pregnancy she flees as an 18 year old girl from her family and the institution where she is kept. She starts to live as a homeless person and is capable of taking rather good care of herself for 15 years. But then things go wrong: she is wrongly accused of murdering a businessman and while she hides from the police three other murders follow. In the end she is capable of unravelling the true cause of these murders with the help of 15 year old Patrik, who she meets when hiding in the attic of a secondary school.

This was a very entertaining introduction to the work of yet another excellent Swedish author of thrillers. Definitely worth a read.

Definitely something missing
Over recent years, Scandinavian and Islandic crime writers have produced some of the most exciting and fresh contributions to the genre. And, at first glance, Karin Alvtegen's "Missing" seems to fit right in - an intriguing premise, played out against a starkly realistic setting. The book tells of a brutal serial killer's murder spree, as seen through the eyes of everybody's prime suspect: Sibylla, a young homeless woman with a history of mental health problems. The cards are truly stacked against Sibylla, as a chance meeting with the first victim and her own tragic past conspire to rob her of her one ruthlessly guarded treasure - her freedom. As the net draws ever closer, her deeply ingrained paranoia threatens to turn into suicidal desperation but fate sends her an ally with whose help she decides to fight back and track down the real killer. So far, so good.

Despite the sometimes rather clunky translation, there are some truly gripping scenes - when Sibylla meets one of her homeless friends, for example, whose psychotic antics attract the attention of two police officers. Or when she is attacked by a former partner who turns into a brutal bully and rapist whenever he's drunk. These moments convincingly show the dark side of Sibylla's precious freedom. Sadly, though, Alvtegen cannot sustain this gritty atmosphere throughout the novel. Sibylla, in an obvious attempt to make her more sympathetic, is a far too sanitized character: She used to spend her days in a drunken stupor, she stank, she scavenged food from bins, but by the time Alvtegen introduces us to her she is looking after herself and is saving to buy a little cottage. On the whole one never gets the feeling that Alvtegen is completely at ease with her material; she sets up an interesting and rather tough premise, only to spoil it by essentially opting out of it on a regular basis: Though homeless and jobless, Sibylla has the - rather large amount of - money needed in her search for the killer; she also finds a convenient ally who not only provides her with all the necessary clues so that she can instantly hit upon the motive for the murders, but also knows a computer hacker just when they need to break into a secure data base (not to mention that he also has close and useful relations with someone in the police force).

If you thought about buying "Missing" because the cover blurb sounded interesting, read George Dawes Green's thriller "The Caveman" (aka "The Caveman's Valentine") instead. It's the story of a homeless man with mental problems who has to track down a killer after a body is left in his hiding place, implicating him in the murder and it's much, much better.