HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: True story. “Lars Kepler” is the pen name for Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril, a husband and wife writing duo who live in Stockholm. Listen to this: Both Alexandra and Alexander were established writers in their own right before they adopted the Kepler pen name together.
At first, they kept their real identities secret—no one knew who Lars Kepler was when they published their debut Kepler novel, The Hypnotist. Their debut was so popular in Scandinavia that there was an actual manhunt to uncover their identities!
The Swedish media hired a profiler to build a profile of Kepler, and even had a tip line running to try to identify who was behind the pen name. And eventually they were discovered.
But with their identities revealed–their success has continued. They are #1 international bestsellers and their books have sold more than 15 million copies in 40 languages. Their newest bestseller is THE MIRROR MAN.
And listen to this, Reds and readers.
Lars Kepler has—have?—arranged for you not only to read an exclusive excerpt of their brand new sure-to-be blockbuster bestseller (and this is not available anywhere else!)
>but they are also giving away THREE copies of the book!
Read the excerpt, then see how to enter to win below.
In this exclusive excerpt from The Mirror Man, detective Joona Linna is called to the scene of a crime in Stockholm, Sweden. A young woman’s body has just been found in a city park, and Joona quickly recognizes her as the very same woman whose unsolved disappearance five years prior sparked national attention. Where has she been all these years? And who could have committed such a heinous crime?
Answering these questions will bring Joona Linna face to face with the most terrifying villain he’s ever encountered.
FROM THE MIRROR MAN
by Lars Kepler
“So . . . we’ve followed the people who were in the area before and after the murder. Some of them appear on several cameras before disappearing.”
Johan picks up a pack of Pop Rocks, tears off one corner, and tips the contents into his mouth. They crackle between his teeth, popping and hissing as he brings up the footage.
“What time frame are we looking at?” asks Joona.
“I’ve been checking from nine o’clock the evening before and onward. There are a lot of people milling around then—several hundred pass the playground during the first hour And I stopped at four-thirty the next morning, when the place is crawling with cops.”
“Perfect.”
“I’ve cut together the relevant clips, person by person, to make it a bit more manageable.”
“Thanks.”
“Let’s start with the victim,” says Johan, hitting “play.”
The dark CCTV footage fills the screen, a time stamp in the top corner. From the far side of Svea Road, the camera captures the entrance to the Rådmans Street subway station. At the edge of the screen, a section of the park and the rounded façade of the university building are visible. The resolution is fairly sharp, despite the darkness.
“She’s coming soon,” Johan whispers.
The time stamp shows three in the morning, and in the glow of the streetlamp, the heavy rain looks like a series of sloping scratches.
Outside a shuttered convenience store and the steel door of the public restrooms, the pavement is glistening.
A man in a thick coat and a pair of yellow rubber gloves searches the trash can and then shuffles off along the wall of torn posters and pressure-washed graffiti.
Otherwise, the city is almost deserted. A white van drives by. Three men drunkenly stagger toward McDonald’s.
The city seems to darken as the rain becomes heavier.
A paper cup trembles on the low wall surrounding a pond. The water surges
through a grate.
A person enters the shot from the left, rounds the entrance to the subway station, and pauses beneath the overhanging roof, her back to the glass doors.
A taxi passes by on Svea Road. Its headlights sweep over her face and her blond hair. Jenny Lind.
In just ten minutes’ time, she will be dead. Her face is in shadow again.
Joona thinks about her brief struggle, legs kicking so hard that her shoes come off.
When the blood supply to the brain is cut off, the feeling of suffocation is nowhere near as gradual as it is when you hold your breath. Before the darkness finally overtakes you, the feeling is explosive and panicked.
Jenny hesitates and then steps out into the rain, turning her back to the camera, and walks past the convenience store, down the path at the end of the pond. Then she disappears from view.
One of the security cameras from the Public Library has captured her from a distance. The resolution is poor, but her hair and face catch the light from a streetlamp before she enters the blind spot around the playground.
“That’s all we have of her,” says Johan Jönson.
“Understood.”
As Joona plays the footage back in his head, he realizes that Jenny knew exactly where she was going, only she hesitated—perhaps because of the rain, or because she was early.
What was she doing in the playground in the middle of the night?
Had she agreed to meet someone?
He can’t escape the feeling that it was a trap.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: SO good, right? Incredibly atmospheric and sinister. And cinematic. Thank you, Lars Kepler!
And to enter to win? Reds and readers, just tell us in the comments who you might imagine playing the role of Joona Linna in an (imaginary) movie. (I imagine Harrison Ford. But then, I always do.)
And an extra entry if you tell us something about Sweden—have you been there?
(When I went, so long ago, I took a tour of..someplace, and there was one bus with a placard in the window that read: Special bus for Camerafans. I thought—where is Camerafans?)
