Katarina Bivalds‘ murder mystery novel about Berit Gardner, the author who solves murders when she should be writing, has been climbing the American bestseller lists since August and was named by the Washington Post as one of five crime novels you must read this fall. But in the fourth installment of the series, Killings in the Archipelago, Berit Gardner comes home to Sweden. 

Katarina Bivald’s clever, philosophical and suspenseful books have won her many readers, not only in Sweden but also in the USA and Canada. After a series of stand-alone novels, including the international phenomenon and bestseller The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, it is now the cozy crime series about the intrepid Berit Gardner that is a success.

This summer, the first installment, The Murders in Great Diddling, was released in North America and went straight onto both USA Today’s and the Vancouver Sun’s lists of new bestselling books. The Washington Post named it one of five crime novels you must read this fall. Since her debut in 2013, Bivald has a wide readership around the world: her debut, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list and became a bestseller in the United States, Canada, France, England, and Taiwan, among other countries. And her books rarely stay on home turf: the Berit Gardner series has so far taken the readers to the English countryside, a French castle and glittering but dangerous luxury in Tenerife.

But the next installment in the series takes place at home in Sweden. Berit Gardner and British Detective Inspector Ian Ahmed are spending a few weeks in a cottage in the Stockholm archipelago when a murder suddenly occurs.

– The cottage in the archipelago is entirely based on my family’s cottage. I spend all my summers here, and every year when the summer guests have packed up and the fog creeps in from the sea, my imagination starts to take off. What if, in this beautiful and somewhat desolate silence, something terrible were to happen? Yes, that’s how a writer’s brain works, unfortunately,” says Katarina Bivald.

What was it like to write about a place so close to your heart?

– It was interesting, because even though my feet know almost every stone on our place on Ängsö, I still saw it with new eyes. I spent weeks out there alone in the fall, winter and early spring, keeping a kind of archipelago diary: every day I noted the temperature of the air and water, the day’s weather and wind, the boats and birds I saw, and the color of the sea, sky, heather and ferns. Me and my cocker spaniel Sam rowed around the islands looking for good places to kill people.

What do you think it is about the archipelago environment that fits so well with murder?

– Maybe it’s the idyll? I think it’s a human instinct that if something looks perfect, you start to wonder what’s under the surface. But for me, I think it’s because it’s a place that lives such a double life: idyll, sunshine and people in the summer; silence, dampness and grayness the rest of the year. It’s the grayness that allures me, I think.

Killings in the Archipelago is now available in Sweden and is published by Bokförlaget Forum.