Goodreads meta-data is 173 pages, rated 3.85 by 2859 litizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Predicable.
A Swedish widow in Götenborg, the eighty-eight year old Maud, lives in an enormous, inherited flat that is the envy of many. She appears harmless and helpless, yet she is in fact irascible and deft at turning the perceptions and prejudices about elderly ladies against others in five loosely linked stories (or is it incidents) in the collection. The covetous neighbour is bamboozled and strung up by her own mobile, the aggressive tourist got stuck in the wrong place by a knitting needle, an antique dealer trying to con her out of her belongings finds himself no longer growing old – and so on. Maud leaves a string of bodies behind her.
When Inspector Irene Huss (there is an in-joke here) notices that Maud’s name keeps coming up on reports about these deaths, she smiles and moves on. What could a harmless and helpless old woman do anyway. Why nothing at all.
Except…!
While the stories were repetitive, Tursten’s afterword about the stimulating challenge to write about a perpetrator rather than a plod was charming, but not quite in proportion to the reading it took to get there.