Poisoned Pen
Published August 25, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Berit Gardner has returned to a place that holds a great deal of meaning for her: to a cottage on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. After solving mysteries alongside Ian Ahmed, a British detective inspector, in England and France, she’s back in Sweden wondering how to fix the roof and anxiously awaiting her birthday. She will be 51, the same age as her mother was when she died. Ian, who is on leave from work after breaking his leg, joins her on the island where, echoing Rear Window, he keeps an eye on a large modern house on a nearby island where an imperious art gallery owner has gathered her flock of resentful children. When Berit and Ian are invited to the elderly woman’s eightieth birthday celebration they realize how toxic she is. She seems to be putting on a show for them of family dysfunction. As the party attendees begin to disperse around the property, they hear a scream. The matriarch has fallen off a rocky shore to her death. It could have been an accident, of course – but Berit and Ian suspect one of the disaffected family members had a hand in it.
The third entry in this mystery series offers a traditional plot: a murder victim who nobody liked, a number of plausible suspects who are mostly nearly as unpleasant, and an investigation led largely by a gifted amateur who ponders clues and finally assembles them all to reveal whodunnit. A portrait emerges of the matriarch, a woman who started influential art galleries but whose caustic personality affected her son and daughter, particularly after she decided the son of a man she married later in life was the only one she cared about. In fact, she’s planning to put him in charge of her legacy rather than her own children who had worked for her for years, though Swedish law prevents her from disinheriting them. Her adult son is embittered, her daughter is constantly seeking approval that never comes, and the stepson is quietly trying to carry on the work of the woman he adores. Ian leaves the investigation in the hands of a local detective when he has to return to his job in England, but Berit stays on, determined to spend the winter in her cottage while pondering the relationships that she believes led to the matriarch’s death.
Perhaps the star of the story is the setting. The author, who spend her own childhood summers on the island where her fictional protagonist is staying, brings the archipelago and the small year-round community to life. It’s a rustic, rugged place of natural beauty. But the puzzle is good, too, and Berit, who is (like her author) a writer puts her ability to attend to people’s deeper feelings to work as she seeks clues in another murder, with Ian assisting from afar. It’s likely the sojourn on the island is temporary and the pair will return to solve future crimes in Cornwall, where the series originated, but any reader who has a special summer place in their childhood memories will be glad she spent this entry in the series on a Swedish island.