Easy Money [Kindle Edition]

This book is about drugs, prostitution, people smuggling, extortion rackets, gangs and violence. There are numerous references to the Balkans war and I wonder if this war bred the violence into the men or maybe the war was so bloody because a lot of violent men took part.

My image of Sweden with its blonde blue eyed Abba types was completely shattered by the violent gangs that seem to rule, certainly in Stockholm. Perhaps it is like it everywhere and I am just naive. The gangs fall into mobs from abroad, motorcycle and some created in prison but they are all extremely violent.

Sweden itself is portrayed as a big brother state where you can't even buy a car without it being flagged by the authorities. One piece refers to metal detectors, at airports, being able to identify large quantities of banknotes by the metal strips.

The other thing that comes through is the racial tensions. As well as on skin colour but also same colour but different nationalities tensions.

However the book made good reading and I really enjoyed it, well thought out and well written. This is one book where you (me) will not feel any empathy with the villains.

Jens Lapidous was a criminal defence lawyer and it is most probable that much of the book comes from his personal experience which makes the book all to believable.

"Easy Money" is a debut crime novel from Jens Lapidus, billed as one of Sweden's most successful criminal defense lawyers, and, on the basis of this book, one of the best acquainted with Stockholm's underworld. It's a new entry in the sweepstakes to follow the phenomenal international success of Stieg Larsson, the superb Scandinavian thriller author, who gave us The Millennium Trilogy before his untimely death. EASY MONEY has received high praise from various Euro critics and high praise indeed from James Ellroy, one of the deans of hard-boiled American mysteries, who wrote, "At last, an epic European thriller to rival the Stieg Larsson books. It's an entirely new criminal world, beautifully rendered - and a wildly thrilling novel."

Lapidus's novel is set in Stockholm's underworld, where cocaine rules, and is told from the perspective of its mob bosses, patsies and thugs. It centers on three men. JW is of humble rural stock, but has managed to crash a rich, chic party crowd: now, if only he had the money to run freely with them. When he's offered the chance to sell cocaine to this crowd, he grabs it. Jorge, a young drug dealer of Chilean origin, has just succeeded in a celebrated breakout from jail, and wants revenge against those who put him there. JW's boss is anxious to recruit Jorge to widen his territory, and sets JW on the Latino's trail. But so is Mrado, brutal muscle in the high on the food chain Yugoslav gang that put Jorge inside in the first place. These three anti-heroes combine and recombine, all seeking their places in the sun.

The novel is written in a language slangy, fast-paced, and telegraphic enough to rival Ellroy's. But, whereas I, like many Americans, have some familiarity with Los Angeles, where Ellroy sets his work, I know very little about Sweden, Yugoslavia, or Chile, and I didn't always know what Lapidus was talking about. Lapidus's writing or perhaps his translator's also has an odd tic: over and over, often several times in a page, he uses a clumsy contraction that I'm not sure exists in English: "Jorge'd,"for, I gather, "Jorge had." This set me into mental gymnastics every time, as I was busy remembering the Latin pronunciation of "Jorge," and then I had to tag the "'d" on its end. A true mental tongue-twister. Furthermore, I found the book to be testosterone-soaked: in its pages, women exist solely for sex and the delivery of children. It often reminded me that the first, Swedish title of Larsson's first book, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was MEN WHO HATE WOMEN. It sometimes seemed to me that I kept reading this long book only because it had opened on a woman's abuse, and I was anxious to find out what had become of her; information that wasn't shared until nearly the end of the book's more than 450 pages. However, the book does finally arrive at a fairly exciting, powerful conclusion.

Come to Scandinavian mysteries, I go back beyond the Martin Beck Mystery Series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Lapidus has got something here, but I'm not sure what. However, I would be willing to give him another try.

This book, set in Stockholm, has 3 main characters from different layers of society who all in one way or the other have connections to Stockholm's criminal underworld and whose lives interconnects as the story progresses.

JW (or Johan), student, ambitious and although originally from the provinces, he pretends to be from a rich family to gain access to the higher echelons of Stockholm society and to have a chance with the unattainable Sophie. His goal seems to move within his grasp when he starts pushing cocaine to his rich mates and thereby gains a reputation as a player in Stockholm's nightlife. The extra cash comes in handy as well both to keep up his expensive habits as well as to help fund his search for his sister who went missing years earlier.

Mrado is a Serbian bodybuilder and former war veteran who works for the Serbian mob in Stockholm. He's a tough guy and is not afraid to use muscle to get what he wants. On a personal level, he is striving for a higher position in the criminal hierarchy as well as trying to be a good father to his daughter Lovisa.

Jorge is a former drug courier who after being set up by the Serbian mob and sent to prison, seeks revenge over his former employers. He succeeds in breaking out of prison but has to realise that revenge is not easy when on the run from the police as well as the criminal underworld.

Even though the three main characters have different backgrounds and motives for their actions, the desire for success, revenge and money means that their lives become interconnected until their faiths collide in a furious finale.

The actual crime part of the book (where JW tries to find out what happened to his sister) does not take up much of the book, but it is a very informative view on Stockholm's organised crime written by somebody who obviously knows the system (even if we can hope that it's not quite as bad as this!).

The writing style is quite fast and to the point when it comes to sentence structure whereas he spends an inordinate time on describing e.g. people's clothing habits which is part of the reason why this book is more than 450 pages long. He uses different genres (newspaper articles and court case transcripts) to move along the action from time to time which is a good idea.
I found the book very informative and at times very entertaining; unfortunately I did not like or engage with any of the main characters and that mixed with the long descriptive parts made it a bit of a chore to finish the book. It's doubtful I'll be reading the two future instalments in the series.