The Lonely Ones
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Håkan Nesser
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Year of Publication: 2021
Group dynamics can create aching loneliness when there are dark secrets to be kept, even for the golden youth of Uppsala University. Fasten your seatbelts for DI Barbarotti’s intriguing fourth case.
In 1969, six very diverse young people in the old university city of Uppsala are embarking on their studies. Two are brother and a sister. Two are young men who have just done national service together. One is a class warrior, one a theology student, one a would-be entrepreneur, and one a a future journalist. There are two odd young people who may well be geniuses. The group’s lives become inextricably intertwined, but a summer trip through Eastern Europe changes everything, and when their time at university is over, it also signals the end of something else.
Years later, a lecturer at Lund University is found dead at the bottom of a cliff in the woods close to Kymlinge. And chillingly, it is the very same spot where one of the Uppsala students died thirty-five years before.