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TWO SOLDIERS
by Anders Rosund and Börge Hellström, Kari Dickson, trans.
Quercus, June 2014
352 pages
$26.99
ISBN: 1623651352


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This is the story of two young men, blood brothers Leon and Gabriel, growing up in Raby, a southern suburb of Stockholm which sounds much like Cabrini Green (a notorious Chicago ghetto) or certain parts of Harlem. Their fathers are either in jail, long dead, and/or unknown to them. Their mothers love them, and yet can't truly provide what any young boys need. Drugs and the peripheral niceties of the drug trade surround all of them. It's no wonder they grow up aspiring to be a drug lord - they don't know anything else.

Their status is determined by some wall in Jose Pereira's office. He head the Stockholm Organized Crime & Gang Section. He keeps tabs on the boys and men he arrests; there are pictures of up-and-comers on one wall, those who have made it on another. The boys of Raby know when pictures go up, get moved, or are removed. Pereira works, at times, with Stockholm DCI Ewert Grens. They come together when Leon and Gabriel plan and execute a prison break from a maximum security prison. In the process, a female warden is killed.

It's not the first time these two kids have killed - it IS the first time they've killed outside their peer group. Grens and Pereira are determined to find and prosecute these two. Prosecuting is difficult; Leon and Gabriel have made a fine art of recruiting minors, who can't be sent to prison if/when they are caught. To betray a member of one's gang means either death or something as bad as death.

One of the two policeman has history with one of the two boys, history that may or may not have consequences for the investigation. As in any fairly closed community where there are factions, people know their enemies, often as well as they know their friends. This interconnectedness is an ongoing theme in TWO SOLDIERS.

Dark, gritty, urban noir? You found it. Depressing story about young gangs growing up, sometimes, to be barely old enough to prosecute gangs? You got it. Slice of the life that nobody wants dealt to them? Here it is. Writing that makes you put the book down because it is so vivid, thus bringing that ghetto reality right at you, yet compels you to pick it back up and read more. These guys do it, chapter after chapter after chapter. Six hundred pages and more of beautifully written life as nobody ought to have to live it. The people of Raby have few choices, most of which they don't even know about until it's too late to make them. Powerful book by two writers who know their stuff.

§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, November 2014

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