Three Seconds
Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom
Translated from the Swedish by Kari Dickson

Silver Oak
January 2011/ ISBN 9781402785924
Foreign Suspense / Sweden
Amazon

Reviewed by Barbara Buhrer

Piet Hoffman is a devoted husband and the father of two young sons. He is also an ex-con who has been working undercover for the Swedish police for 9 years. He has risen through the ranks of the Polish mafia and is chosen to lead the Poles effort to control the supply of amphetamines in the Swedish prisons. He gets himself arrested and sent to a maximum-security prison where he is to work with the prison supplier until he has all the information needed for the police to intervene. A drug deal goes bad; he is betrayed by the top police brass and is the targeted for death by both the police and the mafia.

This is a brilliant thriller. It is a grim story revealing the reality of life in the Swedish prison system. It is a story of betrayal, double-dealing double agents, escapes and brilliant police work. It is full of suspense, keeping the reader's attention from the first page to the last with its unexpected ending.

Reviewer's Note: Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' award for Swedish Crime Novel of the Year (2009)