The 8th entry in the Irene Huss police procedurals, this story has several concurrent cases, one involving entrapment of young girls over the internet, another the discovery of a long-ago murdered man walled up in a chimney. Huss has a new boss, a manipulative woman who flirts with the men and doesn't seem to be able to see the only other woman on her staff. That trouble is bound to carry over to the next book. ( )

Superintendent Sven Andersson has moved to the New Tricks Cold Cases department for the last few months before his definitive retirement: whilst investigating the murder of a father and son with ramifications that seem to go back to 1941, he comes across a serious case of non-returned library books. Meanwhile, Irene and her colleagues in Violent Crime are in pursuit of a rapist and murderer who uses something called "the internet" to lure young girls into his clutches.

As often happens, Tursten's technique struggles a bit with the problem of how to bind internet technology into a plausible plot, and the translation doesn't help (I don't think "palmtops" were around any more in 2008...). But it's all still quite entertaining. ( )

This is another strong entry in an unusually satisfying series. For me, two things make Detective Inspector Irene Huss stand out among the legions of Scandinavian police people -- she's not depressed, and she has an interesting and involving personal life. Those patterns persist in this latest outing, though the tone is a bit darker than in some of the earlier stories: Irene's daughters have left home, her mother is failing, and she has problems with her new boss. But Irene soldiers on. This time, the central focus is on a killer who entraps young girls over the internet; tracking him down and setting him up is a gripping story. There is a subsidiary story centered on a long-dead body found walled up in a collapsed building -- was he part of another sort of net, a net of spies? All in all, a very satisfying read. ( )

It's always a pleasure to catch up with Detective Inspector Irene Huss. Not only are there fascinating cases to solve, but Huss has such an interesting personal life. In The Treacherous Net we get to see her twin daughters leaving the nest and the problems her aging mother is beginning to have. It's amazing how anyone can do a job as well as Irene when you consider just how busy she is, and that's part of her charm for me-- watching how she manages to take care of everything.

As nice as it is to catch up with Irene's personal life, I have to admit that this book-- although good-- is not a strong book in the series, and it's all to do with the two plotlines. The cold case involving the mummified body at the demolition site is moderately intriguing, but it detracts from the internet serial killer plot. This second plot is strong and engaging, but its momentum is killed each time the cold case rears its head. The cold case, with its World War II and 1983 ties, is not strong enough to carry an entire book. Using it in a novella would have been better. The focus would've stayed on the internet serial killer, and I would have been turning pages so fast that they would've caught fire.

Although flawed, The Treacherous Net is still an entertaining read in a very strong and very highly recommended series. ( )

This latest in a reliable police procedural series combines a realistically grounded and competent female detective, Irene Huss, working on realistically sordid crimes in Sweden’s second-largest city, Göteborg. In this entry, a young girl who appears to have been lured into the sex trade through internet-based grooming has been murdered, and this murder is the tip of the iceberg. As if that’s not enough to keep the homicide detectives busy, a mummified body is uncovered as a building is being demolished. The two investigations are nicely laid out and we catch up on what’s going on in Irene’s life at home and in the workplace. I enjoy the low-key way this series addresses social issues without too much drama and a non-angsty, non-alcoholic protagonist who resolutely believes that things can be put right by good people doing their jobs well. If Swedish crime has a crowd of gloomy detectives in one corner and a bunch of unlikely crimes in picturesque settings in the other, Tursten plants her flag in the middle: in a place where most of us live. Translator Marlaine Delargy does justice to this author’s straightforward prose style.