December 23, 2013
Henrik "HP" Pettersson's a gamerâin every sense of the wordâwhich might explain why, instead of kicking back and savoring his victory over the bad guys in Buzz, Swedish author de la Motte's second entry in his crime trilogy, HP must now try to destroy the Internet scheme known as "the Game" once and for all and free both himself and his sister, Rebecca. But that's going to be a Herculean task, even for someone with HP's paranoid genius, because the evil Game Master has so many weapons in his arsenalâincluding Becca herself, who has just been made head of security at the Game-linked IT behemoth PayTag. The setup of several intriguing storylines (including one suggesting that the late Petersson paterfamilias may having been leading a double or triple life) makes for a sluggish start, but this third installment eventually hits bullet-train speed as it hurtles toward a twisty finale, interwoven with a Swedish royal wedding. Agent: Federico Ambrosini, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden).
February 1, 2014
The Swedish crime trilogy begun in Game (2013) and continued in Buzz (2014) wraps up with this exciting and surprising novel. HP Pettersson, living off the grid after cleaning out the bank account of the people who operate the deadly Game, a role-playing exercise with very real human consequences, is shocked to begin receiving text messages from someone asking him if he wants to play one last time. Meanwhile, his sister, on leave from her government job as a bodyguard, discovers she's a key-holder of a safe-deposit box she never knew existedand that HP is the other key-holder. What secrets lie in the box? What does an old friend of HP's deceased father have to do with the Game? Will the mysterious operators of the Game finally be revealed? The author builds on the events of the first two books, generating tremendous suspense, and the writing here is more fluid, more nuanced than in the earlier volumes. Overall a very good trilogy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)