The Bomber

Author/Guide: Liza Marklund

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: A journalist as a crime investigator in Sweden makes for quite a unique premise in Scandinavian crime fiction

ISBN: 978-0552160926
Translator: Neil Smith
Genre: Thriller

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What you need to know before your trail

Crime reporter Annika Bengtzon is woken by a phone call in the early hours of a wintry December morning. An explosion has ripped apart the Olympic Stadium. There is a victim.

Annika starts to investigate but then there is a second explosion. Its turning into quite the story.She is looking at an exclusive and her career could soar as a result

But the more she delves into the case, she starts to uncover what some might consider as too much – and she could actually end up being the story herself.

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Travel Guide

A wintry Stockholm is the atmospheric setting for this thriller of a story featuring a news reporter who investigates rather than a police officer in the main role. Annika Bengtzon is not your usual reporter mind as she is as fixated with finding the perpetrator as any police official would be. With snow on the ground, Stockholm might appear as a wintry paradise which makes what follows all the more horrific. When you add in that it’s only a few days to Christmas as well and well this paradise is set to really set to be turned on its head.

Stockholm has several landmarks but it its the Stadion -the city’s Olympic Stadium which is one of the most well known and the most well loved. Seeing this as part of a thriller makes you think and love this landmark even more for the homage it pays to both it and the athletes.

The Swedes are very proud of their Stadium and their sporting prowess and so to mix the media and the Stadium in this way was a fine way to discover the city and the role of sport in it.

Lisa Marklund says at the end of the book that she used to be a boss within Swedish TV station TV4 and had the idea to write the book based on her own experiences of management and being a female boss and found a good mix for her heroine with a mix between her daughter and her favourite boss at the Expressen newspaper. This makes for a thrilling insight fictional or not into the Swedish media environment.