Three Hours

by Anders Roslund, Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Translator), Börge Hellström

Overview

The explosive third novel in the Ewert Grens--Piet Hoffmann trilogy, which began with Three Seconds.

Stockholm, Sweden. Seventy-three refugees have been found dead, suffocated in a container at Varta harbour.

Niamey, Niger. Ewert Grens arrives in a city he's never heard of, in search of a man he never thought he would see again.

Piet Hoffmann has again got himself in too deep, infiltrating a West African trafficking ring. He thinks he has two weeks to extricate himself, but will learn that his life, and that of countless defenceless people, now hangs on his actions during three desperate hours.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784295387
Publisher:	Quercus Publishing
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Series:	Ewert Grens Series , #8
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	195,340
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Roslund and Hellström are Sweden's most acclaimed fiction duo.

Award-winning journalist Anders Roslund is the founder and former head of Kulturnyheterna (Culture News) on Swedish television, and for many years worked as a news reporter - specializing in criminal and social issues - and as an Editor-in-chief at Rapport and Aktuellt, Sweden's two foremost news programmes.

Börge Hellström (1957-2017) was an ex-convict who brought a unique insight into the brutal reality of criminal life. He worked with the rehabilitation of young offenders and drug addicts, and was one of the founders of the crime prevention organization KRIS (Criminals Return Into Society).

Their DCI Ewert Grens novels have won the Glass Key Award, the Best Swedish Crime Novel award, the CWA International Dagger, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, been translated into 31 different languages, and their worldwide sales are approaching 3 million copies. Visit their website at www.roslund-hellstrom.com.

Roslund and Hellström are Sweden's most acclaimed fiction duo.

Award-winning journalist Anders Roslund is the founder and former head of Kulturnyheterna (Culture News) on Swedish television, and for many years worked as a news reporter - specializing in criminal and social issues - and as an Editor-in-chief at Rapport and Aktuellt, Sweden's two foremost news programmes.

Börge Hellström (1957-2017) was an ex-convict who brought a unique insight into the brutal reality of criminal life. He worked with the rehabilitation of young offenders and drug addicts, and was one of the founders of the crime prevention organization KRIS (Criminals Return Into Society).

Their DCI Ewert Grens novels have won the Glass Key Award, the Best Swedish Crime Novel award, the CWA International Dagger, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, been translated into 31 different languages, and their worldwide sales are approaching 3 million copies. Visit their website at www.roslund-hellstrom.com

Editorial Reviews

The Swedes have a lock on hard-hitting crime novels on the order of Three Hours, the latest in a string of superb procedurals written by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, and translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel.

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

11/18/2019

Roslund and Hellström’s complex seventh crime thriller to be published in the U.S. featuring Det. Supt. Ewert Grens (after 2017’s Three Minutes) effectively highlights the horrors of human trafficking. Grens is summoned to a Stockholm hospital after a mortuary technician realizes that she has an extra corpse in her facility. The extra body, of an African male who died of suffocation, bears no identifying marks or papers, but Grens resolves to make every effort to identify him and determine how he ended up in the morgue. The trail leads him to a storage container filled with more than 60 corpses, all apparently refugees who had been deprived of enough air to survive. One of the bodies has a phone concealed in its clothing, with a fingerprint that matches Piet Hoffmann, a former government informant now working to protect a food convoy in the Sahara. Grens travels to Niger, where he gets the informant to agree to help him locate and thwart the human traffickers by threatening to expose a crime of which Hoffmann has not been suspected. The authors keep the suspense high to the nail-biting end. Fans of action mingled with a moving portrayal of real-life tragedies will be pleased. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Three Hours



"The Swedes have a lock on hard-hitting crime novels on the order of Three Hours, the latest in a string of superb procedurals written by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"The Ewert Grens series by Anders Roslund and (the late) Borge Hellstrom is one of those rare canons where someone like myself is often at a loss to put forth appropriate superlatives...there is promised at least one more book in the series. On the strength of THREE HOURS, you will want a hundred."
—Joe Hartlaub, BookReporter

"The authors keep the suspense high to the nail-biting end. Fans of action mingled with a moving portrayal of real-life tragedites will be pleased."
—Publishers Weekly

"[In Ewert Grens] the authors have created an eccentric, alienated, socially inept hero worthy of comparison with Swedish mystery master Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander."—Wall Street Journal

"Roslund / Hellstrom are among the very best crime novelists around. They write with courage and intensity about the important issues of our time. Extraordinarily compelling."—Daily Mail

Shortlisted for Dutch magazine, Vrij Nederland's Thriller of the Year Award


"Not only is [Three Hours] a thrilling novel with a strong plot, it is an old school Scandinavian thriller that turns a critical eye to the refugee issue and the new cynicism in society."
—Vrij Nederland, Netherlands

"Roslund has done some thorough research. In this suspenseful novel, he not only tells us how smugglers operate, but how men and women in key positions in various aid organizations and in politics actively facilitate the trafficking of refugees for blood money.... Roslund has given his main characters fascinating backgrounds.... In the prologue, Roslund tells us how he got to know Hellström and why they eventually started writing crime novels as a duo. The reason had much to do with social criticism, according to Roslund, the very core of the Swedish crime novel, and with reviving these strong stories. And Three Hours is a striking example of this."—De Standaard, Netherlands

Praise for the Three Seconds Trilogy

"A nail biter of a book."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"A thrill-a-minute cat-and-mouse game . . . A grimly amoral tale."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"Twisty plot makes for propulsive reading."—Entertainment Weekly

"A sprawling and often gripping thriller . . . The gritty details of drug dealing, of prison life, and of the relations between cops and informants are all rendered with convincing authority in Three Seconds."—Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher