Three Hours
“The Ewert Grens series by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom only gets better with every book published, and Three Hours is the best yet.”
The Ewert Grens series by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom only gets better with every book published, and Three Hours is the best yet. This Swedish writing duo rivals the best of Scandinavian suspense authors.
Aging, overweight Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens of Stockholm Police is faced with a puzzle: the Soder Hospital morgue has one too many bodies. There are 23 bodies when there should only be 22.
“There’s a corpse with no paper trail, no registration. A dead man with no identification, no history. He doesn’t exist.”
The question is how does a dead African end up in a Swedish morgue when security camera show that no one entered the morgue during the night?
If one unidentified body is not enough, another appears, this one a young African woman, again with no security camera evidence of anyone entering the morgue.
“Somebody hid you here where you belong, with a strange kind of thoughtfulness, made the effort to see you treated as you should be—and at the same time threw you away like you were nothing more than a piece of trash, hoping you’d disappear forever.”
Ewert remembers a map of the morgue from another case from years before, a map that showed a door from the cold storage room into the hundreds of miles of tunnels that run beneath Stockholm.
Locating the almost invisible door, Ewert, his favorite officers, Mariana Hermansson and Sven Sundkvist, and two tracking dogs with their handler follow the scent of the bodies to the harbor and a rusted packing container. What is inside is worse than anything Ewert has ever seen as a homicide investigator.
Seventy-three bodies stacked like cordwood, and covered with the foam from a fire extinguisher to keep the stench of putrefaction hidden amounts to “. . . a mass grave.”
A satellite phone sewn into a coat amidst a pile of clothes suddenly rings. Ewert recovers the phone and takes it to Forensics to be fingerprinted and processed. Two are found: one matches the male body in the morgue, and the other matches a man who has promised to leave his criminal ways behind and live a good life.
Ewert promises he will never see Piet Hoffmann again after Piet completes an infiltration of a Colombian drug cartel and returns with his wife and two sons to Sweden. The two men, cop and ex-criminal, are through with each other.
Apparently not, though, if Piet’s fingerprint means he has a part in this human trafficking represented by 73 dead bodies crammed into a rusty container, and others left in two different morgues.
Ewert meets with Piet’s wife, Zofia, who is angry to see him at her door, but ashamed at the same time. Ewert had helped them escape the drug cartel, actually saved Piet’s life; she shouldn’t be so angry and frightened.
Zofia tells Ewert that Piet is in Niamey, Niger, where he works for a security firm licensed by the UN to guard food transports to refugee camps. Zofia believes that it may be first good thing Piet has ever done although his schedule of three months in Africa and two weeks home is hard on the family.
Piet’s last trip to the refugee camp is caught in an ambush. Piet’s personal philosophy is “You or me. And I care more about me than about you, so I choose me.”
That philosophy has enabled him to kill rather than be killed during both his criminal career and his life as an infiltrator for two different governments, so he doesn’t hesitate to kill the two men who staged the ambush.
Both men are a blight on humanity, so in Piet’s opinion they got what they deserved. He explains to his Danish friend and fellow guard, “almost every assault lately has had this goal—destroying the food to increase the number of refugees . . . The more refugees there are the more money they make.”
Ewert flies to Niamey, Niger, a place he has never heard of and doesn’t particularly want to visit, but he must meet Piet. He must know if Piet is innocent of human trafficking, and if so, how did his fingerprint end up on a dead refugee’s phone.
Ewert meets a fellow Swede, a man who works with the UN on behalf of Sweden to find solutions to the plight of Africa’s refugees. Thor Dixon is as cosmopolitan as Ewert is not, but both are enraged and saddened by the deaths of the refugees in Sweden.
Ewert’s meeting with Piet is unpleasant for both men. Piet met with the dead refugee on behalf of Zofia. A refugee child, Zofia’s student in Sweden, told her of his cousin and his wife, and Zofia persuaded Piet to help the couple if he could.
Ewert subtly forces Piet to infiltrate the human trafficking organization, so the detective can learn the name of the Swede in charge of the arrival of the refugees.
Piet learns how the operation works and learns the code name of the Swedish contact, but instead of disappearing with what he knew, he decides to destroy the organization. Nothing so evil should be allowed to continue to exist.
Back in Sweden two more murders occur as the Swedish contact begins killing off the loose ends involved in the trafficking operation: Zofia’s student and a homeless man who served as guide through the tunnels for the disposal of the bodies.
Roslund and Hellstrom racket up the suspense as Piet and Ewert in separate countries race to save the innocent and punish the guilty. No duo of writers can combine mystery suspense with a social issue as skillfully and passionately as these two.
The characters of Ewert and Piet, dedicated cop and the former criminal, are as realistic as any in literature. Ewert, the lonely aging man with no family and no purpose except his job, touches the heart with his poor social skills and good intensions.
Piet, on the other hand, has a more elastic moral code, one that can stretch to killing if it is a him or me situation. One can understand his reasoning, but sometimes he kills someone who just needs killing. Liking Piet is like living with a pit bull: One never knows when he might bite.
Highly recommended for fans who like their mystery thrillers a little edgy.