Tove Alsterdal Books In Order

Publication Order of High Coast Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Tove Alsterdal is a mystery fiction novelist who is best known for the “High Coast” series of novels.
The author was born in 1960 in Malmo Sweden but spent much of her childhood 700 miles in the north in Umea. Tove calls her parents class travelers as they moved through several social classes while she grew up.
Her mother was born near the Swedish/Finnish border in the small town of Tornedalen, which was a gateway between the West and the East.

She was a teen when World War II broke out and for a time, she was employed as an interpreter for refugees who had fled across the Torne, which is a river that separates Sweden from Finland.

Tove then became a sociologist making history as the woman who started the first women’s shelter in Sweden and ultimately became the chair of the National Organization for Women’s Shelters.

Her literary prowess to some extent comes from her father who was a translator, journalist, diplomat, and author who penned works such as “Anti-Zionism: The Example of Poland,” and “Anti-Semitism.”

While Tove Alsterdal loved reading and writing, her very first job was as an attendant and psychiatric nurse in a Beckomberga psychiatric hospital.

But she would then move to the north of Sweden and attend Kalix Folkhogskola, where she studied journalism. It was at college that she met Liza Marklund with whom she became great friends that she would later edit many of her novels.
From there, she became a freelance journalist and during the 1990s, she wrote manuscripts for film, theatre, TV, and radio. For a time, she even was in charge of a cabaret theatre that she ran with her former husband.

At some point, she got too frustrated working on TV as she had so little time to explain her stories when all she wanted to do was go deeper. It was at this time that she began thinking of becoming an author.

Tove Alsterdal ultimately found the depth she needed in telling her stories by writing crime fiction. In 2009 she penned her debut work as a thriller she titled “Women on the Beach.”
Initially, the work was supposed to be a movie manuscript but most producers believed it would be too expensive to produce and hence she decided to make it into a novel.

In that very year, she published “The Forgotten Dead,” her debut novel which made her a publishing sensation in Sweden.

She has since published several other novels that have also made a huge splash across Europe, particularly in Sweden and in the United Kingdom.

Most of her works are about the big socio-political issues of the day, which she then overlays with the personal perspectives and experiences of the people caught up in them.
The movie rights of her debut were sold to a British company.

“We Know You Remember” by Tove Alsterdal is a riveting mystery fiction novel in which the Scandinavian atmosphere meets the classic procedural in the case of a hidden girl, a missing girl, and a decades-long coverup.
It has been more than two decades since Olof Hagstrom left home but immediately he came back, he knew something was wrong.

Hidden under the familiar stone is the front door key and inside there is water pooling on the floor, a terrible stench, and a panicked dog. Father Olaf who he has not spoken to in more than twenty years is dead in the house where he had been taking a shower.
For Eira Sjodin, the police detective, investigating the very suspicious death brings back long forgotten nightmares. She had only been nine when fourteen-year-old Olof Hagstrom was found guilty of the rape and murder of a local girl.
It had been a case that had left an indelible mark on the collective memory of the town and had filled Eira’s childhood with fear.

Since Olof was too young to be sentenced, he had been exiled from his family and sent to a youth home never to be seen again until now.
It is a beautifully written and relentlessly suspenseful novel about memory and guilt with all manner of unexpected twists.

Tove Alsterdal’s “You Will Never Be Found” sees Eira Sjodin the detective racing to solve a missing person case that hits very close to home.
North of the Arctic Circle in Malmberget a very small mining town, the residents and their homes are facing forceful relocation.

The mine that was once the lifeline of the town is slowly swallowing it building by building and street by street, as the entire community is collapsing into the pit. Only a few residents refuse to leave as they cling to their homes.
When two workers who had been making preparations for a relocation hear some weird sound from a basement, they break into the house through a cellar window to find a terrified man hiding in the corner.
700 kilometers away in AdalenEira Sjodin is working on the case of the disappearance of a man whose ex-wife had reported him missing.

Working with her colleagues they had done everything to find him but it seems he has vanished without leaving any trace behind.

In this installment, Eira Sjodin is at the mercy of a dangerous but very elusive perpetrator, even as she falls in love despite how hard she resists it.

“Djuphamn” by Tove Alsterdal is the final novel of the “High Coast” series of novels.

At the opening of the novel, divers descend into the Angermanalven looking to explore the dozens of shipwrecks on the bottom. But upon arriving at the bottom they find the remains of a man who it is believed had been murdered.
His identity remains a mystery but the clues lead back to Adalen and the world of the 1960s with big dreams of freedom and fierce political conflicts.

Eira Sjodin the police detective who is on internal duty and pregnant is investigating the case since the higher-ups believe it would not be too taxing.

Over a few weeks of investigations, the truth of the dead starts to creep close to her family and her own life, even as the date set for her delivery comes closer.