White Angel

A dark and rainy evening in March, two teenagers sneak into one of the abandoned buildings of the old mental hospital Sankt Lars in Lund. As they go searching for the infamous ghost said to house in the assembly room, they tumble on clutter and suddenly find themselves in front of a body hidden in one of the hospital’s walls.

Thirty years earlier, the mental hospital got mixed up in a scandal when two patients, Marie-Louise Sparre and Tommy Svensson, disappeared. Despite a big search rescue, they were never found. The Sparre family was convinced of Tommy’s culpability in Marie-Louise’s disappearance, even though there was no evidence pointing in that direction. However, the new discovery made by the teenagers raises a haunting question: could this body be the long-lost Marie-Louise?

Police investigator Fredrika Storm and her partner Henry Calment re-open the old case, unearthing the grim events that transpired within the hospital’s walls.  It soon becomes clear that someone is willing to go to extreme lengths to keep the truth from coming out. The question is: what are they trying to keep hidden?

White Angel is the second installment in the successful crime series about police investigator Fredrika Storm. In this intricately written novel Frida Skybäck delves into the dark history of the Swedish mental healthcare at a time when the ends sometimes justified the means, with no thought of how it might affect the patients and their families. Skybäck details how powerful forces have ruled in secrecy before being exposed to the public. Grimness and humor are united in an intelligent plot with many fascinating characters and a language that makes this novel a real page-turner.