- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Canongate International (26 Jun 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 184195408X
- ISBN-13: 978-1841954080
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.8 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 920,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Missing
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Sybilla Forsenstrom doesn't exist. For fifteen years she has been excluded from society and, as one of the homeless in Stockholm, she takes each day as it comes, keeping all her possessions in her rucksack - apart from a knife and salami which she stores in a smart briefcase. She is always well-dressed and displays impeccable manners. One night, in The Grand Hotel, she charms a susceptible businessman into paying for her dinner and room. His dead body is discovered the following morning and Sybilla becomes the prime suspect. When a second person is killed in similar circumstances, she becomes the most wanted person in Sweden.
About the Author
KARIN ALVTEGEN (b. 1966) is regarded as the most exciting new crime writer in Scandinavia. Missing was awarded the premier Scandinavian crime writing award and was also nominated for the Poloni Award and Best Crime Novel 2000 in Sweden. Alvtegen lives in Stockholm. Her great aunt was Astrid Lindgren.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Homeless, but not a victim...,
This review is from: Missing (Paperback)
Karin Alvtegen is the niece of Astrid Lindgren, but this is not a tale involving pigtails in any shape or form. Instead this gripping crime novel gives us an in-depth portrait of the life of Sibylla Forsenstrom, a homeless Swedish woman.Sibylla's ambition is someday to have a sanctuary, a home of her own, and she is assiduously saving money to reach this goal. Her plans for the future are thrown into disarray when she is framed for a murder that she didn't commit. With the help of a schoolboy, Patrik, who becomes her friend when he discovers her sleeping in the attics of his school, Sibylla turns detective and solves the crimes. The author sensitively handles the traumas in Sibylla's background, and it is a relief to find a crime novel that doesn't automatically relegate a homeless person to the role of murder victim.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent thriller,
By
This review is from: Missing (Paperback)
Sibylla Forstenstroem is the daughter of a rich but insensitive merchant and his wife. After a depression and an unwanted pregnancy she flees as an 18 year old girl from her family and the institution where she is kept. She starts to live as a homeless person and is capable of taking rather good care of herself for 15 years. But then things go wrong: she is wrongly accused of murdering a businessman and while she hides from the police three other murders follow. In the end she is capable of unravelling the true cause of these murders with the help of 15 year old Patrik, who she meets when hiding in the attic of a secondary school.
This was a very entertaining introduction to the work of yet another excellent Swedish author of thrillers. Definitely worth a read.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exciting fugitive thriller,
By Maxine Clarke "Maxine of Petrona" (Kingston upon Thames, Surrey United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Missing (Paperback)
Put aside two or three hours and read this book from beginning to end. It's a tense and involving read, and you won't want to be distracted.
Sybilla is an outcast, living off the radar of the authorities in Stockholm. She has various safe places and strategies for surviving each month until her meagre payment from her mother arrives at a PO box. One of her ploys is to put on a smart suit she keeps in her rucksack (bought from Oxfam), go to a luxury hotel bar, meet a businessman, flirt, pretend to lose her wallet, and trick the mark into paying for her room for the night. Unfortunately, on one of these outings, the man she tricks is found murdered the next morning. Sybilla escapes, but soon finds that she is the main suspect, becoming the victim of a police and media hunt. Sybilla's survival over the next few days is interspersed with the story of how she came to drop out of society. She suffered a childhood of awful mental abuse, which made my blood boil to read about. With nobody to sympathise with her (to the contrary, everyone is against her and/or betrays her) she falls into a trap made of her own idealism and trusting nature, as a result of which she is abused even further by the authorities. The story of Sybilla's childhood leading up to her eighteenth birthday, is equally as harrowing as that of Lisbeth Salander, the main character of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and Sybilla's solution, of living "off the grid", is remarkably similar to Lisbeth's. Matters come to a head when Sybilla discovers that her source of income has dried up. She's now desperate, and friends she's made since living rough cannot or will not help her now. The hunt for her intensifies. Eventually, she thinks of one hiding place where she is likely to be safe - and while there, she finds an unusual ally and a strategy for dealing with her dilemma. MISSING is a tensely exciting book with an extremely sympathetic and capable main character. I think Karin Altvegen is one of the very best talents writing crime fiction today. Congratulations to her for writing such insightful, exciting and thought-provoking novels, and to her English translators for bringing them so effectively to a wider audience. Review first published at the Euro Crime website.
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