Never Fuck Up

April 29, 2013
“Svens” (native Swedes) collide with immigrant groups, from Middle Easterners to ruthlessly organized gangs of “Yugos” and “Turks,” in the gritty second novel in Lapidus’s Stockholm Noir trilogy (after 2011’s Easy Money). Mahmud al-Askori is a pawn in these tribal structures—seduced by promises of easy money, sex, and drugs while trying to shield his family from the collateral damage of his pursuits. Meanwhile, Niklas Brogren, fresh from military service in Iraq, channels his aggression into a garbled feminism devoted to revenge for abused women. And a corpse found in Niklas’s building attracts the attention of xenophobic cop Thomas Andrén, who’s unsettled by an inaccurate autopsy report. Thomas unearths corruption far deeper than the everyday petty dishonesty of Stockholm’s law enforcement; Niklas’s crusade takes an increasingly violent turn; and Mahmud thrashes helplessly against increasing gang pressures. Despite the book’s sprawling length, its morally ambiguous characters and rough street argot will compel reader attention to the last page.

July 1, 2013
Amazing. The cleansing violence that swept through Stockholm in Easy Money (2012) has left the city no safer for three misfits who seem incapable of heeding this sequel's title. Self-styled commando Niklas Brogren has returned home from paid service to the U.S. government determined to go underground, until an unrecognizable corpse that turns up in the basement of the building where he's been living with his mother--and watching Taxi Driver a few too many times--turns his mind to a more activist project: finding and executing abusive men. Mahmud el-Askori, mired in debt to a rising star in the Born to Be Hated gang, finds that the price of extricating himself from his obligation is to incur a much graver obligation to Yugoslav crime boss Radovan Kranjic. Police Inspector Thomas Andren turns in a by-the-numbers report on the dead man in Marie Brogren's basement and then finds, to his astonishment, that the needle marks he plainly indicated on the victim's arm are nowhere mentioned in the pathologist's findings. At first, these three free agents seem to have little to do with each other, but although his prose style often seems based on Action Comics, Lapidus draws their stories together gradually, gradually, with the patience of Dickens. Once Andren is forced off the case by a combination of anonymous threats, official pressure and the obligatory beatings, he wastes no time going independent and soon links the dead man whose drug use no one wants to know about to Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister whose assassination has never been officially resolved. The case, once reopened, will inevitably ensnare both Niklas and Mahmud, though neither in the roles you might expect. Outsized, low-minded, mannered (at least in English translation) and often downright tedious. But there's no doubt that Lapidus creates a dark world that feels, while you're immersed in it, like the whole world.

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June 15, 2013

The second entry in Lapidus's "Stockholm Noir" trilogy (after Easy Money), this ambitious, bleak novel is set in a sordid, dysfunctional Sweden, awash in both corrupt police and ruthless indigenous and immigrant criminals. Lapidus is a criminal defense attorney, and his narrative demonstrates authentic criminal argot and mind-sets. Trafficking, narcotics, PTSD, and loan sharking inform part of the story. The other main element is the reinvestigation of the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. Thomas, a police officer, is quickly forced off the case by higher-ups in the force. Like all true noir protagonists, he takes on the cops and uses illegal measures to purse the truth. The other main players are Niklas, an ex-mercenary, and a low-level thug named Mahmud. VERDICT The stories of the three disparate men intersect in a convincing fashion for the most part, while the Palme conspiracy is a weighty subject meriting a full novel. The retribution that Niklas wants to exact for violence against women in Swedish society is gripping and convincing. Marked by harsh and brash writing, authentic voices, and convincing scenarios full of thugs and thug talk, this engaging novel will appeal to readers who like their crime fiction gritty and dark.--Seamus Scanlon, Ctr. for Worker Education, CUNY

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2013
This second novel in the Stockholm Noir Trilogy (following Easy Money, 2012) intertwines three perspectives of Stockholm's underworld, showcasing contradictions in Swedish society, where idealism, racism, hope, and corruption all swirl. Mahmud, an Arab immigrant just released from prison, longs to be free of gangland clutches even while shaking hands with one kingpin to escape another's wrath. Thomas is a hardened, violent, surprisingly idealistic cop who turns to the Serbian Mafia when the Stockholm police betray him. And Nicklas, recently returned from a mercenary tour in Afghanistan, is convinced that Sweden's true enemy is its epidemic of violence against women, prompting him to launch an obsessive mission to avenge those wrongs. These stories orbit the murder of an unidentified man discovered by Thomas and his partner in Nicklas' mother's building. Lapidus contrasts personal violence with a powerful criminal conspiracy by linking the victim to both Nicklas' childhood and the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. A grand-scale portrait of Stockholm's criminal world that shares James Ellroy's hyperrealism and Richard Price's blend of atmosphere and sociology.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)