More Bitter Than Death

In the chilling follow-up to Some Kind of Peace, Siri Bergman returns to investigate a brutal murder case centered in the dark world of domestic abuse.It’s a rainy evening in a Stockholm suburb, and five-year-old Tilde is hiding under the kitchen table playing with her crayons, when a man enters and beats her mother to death in cold blood. Tilde can’t quite see the murderer, but she’s the only witness. Across town, psychologist Siri Bergman and her friend Aina are meeting with their old friend Vijay, who wants them to host a self-help group for victims of domestic abuse. Over the course of several evenings, five very different women share their stories of impossible love, violence, and humiliation. At the same time, Siri finds herself at a crossroads—she’s carrying her boyfriend’s child, but is still beset by doubts and fears. Swedish sisters Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff weave all these threads together so that the search for healing and the ability to love again are soon transformed into a hunt for Tilde’s mother’s killer. Everyone is a suspect: the many men in the victim’s life, her own son, even some of the women in the self-help group. Grebe and Träff combine the chills of first-rate crime novels with palpable emotion and personal experience (Träff is a real-life psychologist), as More Bitter Than Death builds to a shocking conclusion.