Post Mortem

It is the end of the 80s and Dag, who has inherited some money, buys a red BMW cab and sets off with his friend Pompe on a road trip through Europe. They party and discuss Celine, Hemingway and Leonard Cohen at the same speed as they go from town to town through France down to the Basque Country in northern Spain. However, Pompe’s drinking more and more reveals a violent and dark side and Dag becomes increasingly worried that everything is about to get out of hand.

In Santander, Spain, Pompe and Dag get to know the young waitress Sandra who is taken by the two young intellectual Scandinavians. They represent a lifestyle she longs for, dreaming of becoming a writer, hoping the short story she writes on about a story from her childhood about an encounter with an aggressive wild dog leaving ugly scars on her legs as a memory for life, will open the doors to the literary Parnassus. It is Pompe who in particular attracts Sandra. Before Dag decides to go back home he feels he should make Sandra aware of what he knows all too well about Pompe and what he is capable of…

November 2008 in Stockholm we meet Hans Rekke, who is in a hypomanic period, and Micaela Vargas, who has a new boyfriend she hasn’t yet told Rekke about.

Rekke receives a visit from the Spanish police commissioner Rafael Corales, who cannot forget about an unsolved brutal murder of a young woman in Santander in 1988. He firmly believes this case is connected to other cases of murdered women he recently has found out about. He cannot let go of the thought he has found a serial killer who leaves signs on the bodies of his victims, signs that seem to be a numerical order. Could Rekke help him to decipher these signs?

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The book switches between the two timelines – we get to follow Sandra on the last day of her life in Santander and Rekke and Vargas’ search for clues in Stockholm’s literary coterie. A story unfolds about a serial killer who, with his sadistic and manipulative powers, has succeeded in making his closest friend believe that he is an accomplice. The men are connected by a dark secret, by shame and guilt, and in the repressed memories, the friend even believes that he is the one who carried out the brutal murder.

Pontus Bremer, a successful and boastful writer, succeeds with the help of Sandra’s short story – posthumously published – to find some important clues. And when Rekke, under the pretense of publishing his solved cases, turns to literary agent Oliver Popov, who is equal parts admired and loathed, Rekke believes he may have solved the mystery of who the killer is. But is it maybe a delusion? Is it one or two perpetrators? If yes, where are they to be found today?