The Woman Inside: A Novel

by M. T. Edvardsson

Overview

A wealthy couple ends up murdered in the nicest part of town in this compulsively readable, page-turning thriller from M. T. Edvardsson, The Woman Inside.

Bill Olsson, recently widowed, is desperate to provide for his daughter, Sally. Struggling to pay rent, he welcomes a lodger into their home: Karla, a law student and aspiring judge, who works as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Her clients are the Rytters, an incredibly wealthy couple who hide behind closed doors. The wife is ill and hasn’t left the house in months. The husband is controlling and obsessive. Is he just a worried husband, concerned for his wife’s health? Or is there something more sinister at play?

As Bill’s situation becomes more dire, Karla is forced to make a difficult choice. And when the Rytters wind up dead, and Karla is pulled in for questioning, she’s made to defend some parts of her past she’d rather not revisit.

Every person in The Woman Inside is hiding something, but could any of them really have been driven to kill?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250204615
Publisher:	Celadon Books
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	361,871
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

M. T. Edvardsson is an author and teacher from Trelleborg, Sweden. He is the author of multiple novels, including A Nearly Normal Family, his first published in the United States. He lives with his family in Löddeköpinge, Sweden.

Editorial Reviews

With The Woman Inside, M. T. Edvardsson has written a super well-composed chamber drama, where the darkness dwells, the desperation grows between the characters and the walls are closing in until you´re caught in the trap.”

—Lars Kepler, #1 internationally bestselling author of The Sandman

"Alienation, self-preservation, and hope propel the story toward calamity with unrelenting suspense; highly recommended for fans of psychological thrillers."

—Booklist

"In an impressive feat of structural engineering, M.T. Edvardsson knits together the narratives of three characters wrapped up in a murder in a Swedish college town."

—Shelf Awareness

"[A] crafty psychological thriller... Readers follow with grim fascination as the book’s all-too-human cast stumbles into tragedy. Mr. Edvardsson, the author of “A Nearly Normal Family” (2018), has structured his unpredictable story in clever ways. Even though we know what’s coming, the conclusion delivers a surprising jolt."

—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

2023-03-28
When a wealthy heiress and her husband are found dead in their mansion in the city of Lund, Sweden, a web of deception is discovered to underlie not only their lives, but those of the people whose fates intersect with theirs.

This dark, claustrophobic novel opens with a matter-of-fact police report: “The blinds are down, and all lights are off. Against the wall is a bed with a headboard. On the bed is another dead body.” The woman downstairs has died of a head injury, the man upstairs, of a drug overdose. Could this be a double murder, staged to look like murder-suicide? The truth emerges incrementally and obliquely in a sinuous narrative that focuses mainly on two young women whose distinctive voices lend the novel some badly needed credibility. Both are students; Karla Larsson makes money cleaning houses, while Jennica Jungstedt moonlights as a psychic adviser. “Does it make you feel less alone to call it something else?” Jennica is asked by Steven Rytter, a charming older man she meets on Tinder. She insists on using the term living solo. But such distinctions dissolve when that first date turns into a storybook romance rich in champagne and roses. Karla, meanwhile, happens to be the person employed to clean Steven’s already immaculate house. “Steven’s a doctor and works almost all the time,” she learns. “His wife just lies around sleeping, totally zonked on drugs.” That’s not the story Steven tells Jennica, of course. Then again, he is just one liar among many here—as the novel’s intersecting narratives and brief transcripts of police interrogations attest. The suspense introduced in the early chapters, however, wears thin as the author introduces one too many subplots and fails to stage a convincing denouement.

An angst-ridden but finally weak thriller.

Kirkus Reviews