MARIA GRUND
MARIA GRUND lives on the island of Gotland, where she also penned her debut novel MORTAL SIN. A critics’ favorite, the novel was shortlisted for the Crimetime Specsavers Award and the Storytel Awards, and went onto win the prestigious Swedish Academy of Crime Fiction Award (Best Debut).
MORTAL SIN, celebrated for its unique horror ambiance, plot, and strong female characters has established Maria Grund as a rising star within Nordic crime fiction. The book continues to draw international attention and has so far been sold to no less than eleven countries. In 2022, the sequel DANCE OF DEATH was published.
NIGHT FLIER, part three in the ‘Sanna Berling’-series was published by Polaris in 2023. A prequel set thirty years before MORTAL SIN, we meet a young Sanna Berling joining the police force in the same year that the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, is assassinated. In the coming instalments, THE HUNT (2024) and THE VERSES (2025), readers will follow Sanna Berling’s life and career leading up to MORTAL SIN, bringing fans full circle in a crime series that traverses dark, desolate Scandinavia, its landscapes, and its people.
Photo: Katarina Grip Höök
Agent Erik Larsson
WORKS
NIGHT FLYER
Published POLARIS, 2023
Genre Crime fiction
Pages 352
Rights sold
ESTONIA - Rahva
GERMANY - PENGUIN VERLAG
Russian – Exmo
film/TV - wARNER BROS.
In March 1986, a sixteen-year-old girl witnesses a crime at a motel in southern Sweden. She has left home following a terrible incident that struck her family. Her sister disappeared and was eventually found murdered.
Sanna Berling, a newly minted trainee at the Oskarshamn Police, is assigned the tasks no one else wants. While the rest of the police force is absorbed in the murder of Olof Palme, she's given the job of driving a runaway sixteen-year-old girl back to the village of Augu in Småland.
But while Sanna is in Augu, another teenage girl disappears from the village. It appears she took her parents' car and left. The police view it as a voluntary disappearance. However, Sanna isn't as certain, and she starts looking closer at the old case. Despite the murder in Augu being solved and the perpetrator behind bars, she uncovers disconcerting similarities between the victim and the girl who's now missing. Yet, she struggles to convince her colleagues, and when her own boss tries to persuade her to drop the investigation, she decides to secretly continue on her own.
Sanna’s inquiries lead her from the quaint red-painted facades of the small community and bottomless forest lakes to an isolated, abandoned hospital on the plains of Småland. She's determined to uncover the truth, no matter how chilling, and no matter how alone she stands in the end.
NIGHT FLYER is the third installment in the ‘Sanna Berling’-series and a prequel to MORTAL SIN, taking us back to where it all started for investigator Sanna Berling. In the coming installments THE HUNT (2024) and THE VERSES (2025) readers will follow Sanna Berling’s life and career leading up to MORTAL SIN, bringing fans full circle in a crime series that traverses dark, desolate Scandinavia, its landscapes, and its people.
DANCE OF DEATH
Published MODERNISTA, 2022
Genre Crime fiction
Pages 368
Rights sold
ESTONIA - RAHVA
france - robert laffont
GERMANY - PENGUIN VERLAG
RUSSIA - EKSMO
THE NETHERLANDS - VOLT/SINGEL
film/TV - wARNER BROS.
It is late summer on the remote island off Sweden’s east coast, when a young man is discovered erratically wandering around, naked and confused in the forest.
Sanna Berling is called to the scene. She has just returned to work with the police in a new role as a local officer in a small village, as she does not want to work with violent crime again. But when the man turns out to be severely injured and dies at the scene, she is reluctantly dragged into a new murder investigation.
In a disturbing way, her search for the truth uncovers new dark secrets. Fear and mistrust stirs behind the small town’s facade of tranquility. Teenage boys savagely kick and beat each other up in deserted spaces. A group of teenage girls mysteriously hold the small village in their grip.
Meanwhile the forest is alive with secrets, full of eyes and shadows.
Together with her colleague Eir Pedersen, Sanna is swept into the murder investigation, while still being haunted by the disturbing memories of three years earlier, when a teenager committed a series of violent murders and then disappeared without a trace.
MORTAL SIN
