In the translated version of The Glass Devil, Swedish mystery writer Helene Tursten features Detective Inspector Irene Huss, who investigates the murder of a family in which three of its members, a teacher, the teacher’s pastor father and his mother are murdered in two separate locations and satanic symbols are left drawn in their blood. Huss’s investigation leads her to a child pornography and pedophile ring, more common in Sweden than in the U.S., and reminiscent of the U.S. witch-hunts of the early 1990s. Even without that cultural disconnect, Tursten’s novel is repugnant in that she doesn’t just write about the discovery of child porn — she describes the contents.

Tursten’s, The Glass Devil opens with the principal of a high school telephoning his friend Inspector Andersson, of the Goteborg Crime Police, to report that one of his teachers had failed to show up for work. Since the other detectives are busy with a drug-related murder case, Irene and her boss head to the remote cottage in snowbound southern Sweden where they find the decapitated body of divorced, teacher Jacob Schyttelius. Later Inspector Huss and her colleague Frederick Strindh go to break the news to Jacob’s elderly parents, Pastor Sten Schyttelius and his wife Elsa, only to find the couple dead in their beds, each shot between the eyes. In both cases upside-down pentagrams have been drawn in blood on their computer screens. To make matters worse, they find that both computers had been professionally erased making their only viable lead, Jacob’s London-based sister, Rebecka, a computer programmer who is too devastated by the triple tragedy to offer much assistance. Eventually, however, after having exhausted all avenues of investigation Irene is forced to travel to London to interview Rebekah who had been hired by the Save the Children foundation to help uncover a pedophile ring.

In the meantime, while interviewing the other pastors and church staff, the police find out that Satanists had burned down a nearby church the previous summer and that Jacob and his father were trying to track them down via the internet giving the cult a motive for the killings.  

Tursten does a solid job of populating the novel with credible, flawed characters and providing suspects galore from members of a satanic cult, to assistant pastors. Furthermore, in this sequel to her other books Tursten explores Inspector Huss’ family life where we discover that Irene is happily married, has well-adjusted twin daughters and while ambitious her job isn’t the most important thing in her life. The title of the novel is explained at the end of the book during the wrap up of the murder case, with the explanation that “a glass devil is a person in whom evil has become transparent, but people don’t see it because the devil is blinding them with his attractive side.” While this is not the first novel in the series, lack of familiarity with the previous books will not diminish the reader’s enjoyment or ability to follow the events of the story.

[tags]The Glass Devil, Satanism, Helene Tursten, pediophile, murder, crime, child pornography, fiction[/tags]