Unfortunately, this book wasn't for me. I couldn't connect to the main characters at all and was confused by some of the storyline. I did persevere with it but just didn't enjoy it at all. Hopefully I'm in the minority with my opinions and I do wish the author every success with it.

Many thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this ARC for which I have given my voluntary and unbiased review.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the book in exchange for an honest review.
I really enjoyed this book, I found it extremely interesting and a fascinating read. The police woman was an interesting character and it was fascinating to read of her childhood. Particularly when she returned to where she had grown up and where her mother had died. The story revolves round a missing teenage girl and what has happened to her before, during and after she disappeared. How controlling her mother was and later why she was like that.
I thoroughly enjoyed how the story evolved and how the past and the present intermingled. It was an excellent story.
Highly recommended.

I am just amazed when a debut author presents a crime thriller in a fresh way. Risks abound for it to be taken seriously as if getting published was not already an impossibly high hurdle to so many.
Yet here we have a police procedural that is based in Sweden, that is original, inventive and so imaginative.
At a time when psychology and close relationships seem to be the subject of every new book trying to replicate any female on a form of transport. Lina Bengtsdotter has approach the genre with a discerning gaze and written a remarkable novel.
It is also a book deserving a second reading not because it is over complicated but to appreciate all the nuanced content.
The author also had a number a flawed characters so in an imperfect world no-one in this fictional account, based on small town Sweden, measures up as an upright citizen. I loved the sense of secrets in a tight community where normally everyone appears to know each other’s business.
A missing teenager in a settlement a couple of hours from the capital, sends two Stockholm detectives to support and lend their expertise.
Gullsapång is where the drama takes place. It is also where one of the detectives grew up. It isn’t so much a return of the girl who did so well but a re-union to incomplete memories and thoughts that continue to trouble her mind and sleep.
A wonderful story of broken lives and shattered dreams. A novel that is tense, thrilling and a refreshing pinch of truth.

An atmospheric page turner about a missing girl in a small town, hidden secrets and the detective for whom it may hit rather close to home.

Great writing and plotting, gets you totally caught up in the story which has a strong emotional core and a haunting resolution. 

Full review for the official tour in January.

First of all, I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free ARC of this e-book.
''For the Missing'' is a very promising start of a new Nordic Noir novel series, as it incorporates all the trademark characteristics of the genre both in narrative style and characterization. In her debut novel, Lina Bengtsdotter is faithful to the recipe that the gurus of Scandinavian crime fiction are following, introducing a new protagonist, Charlie Lager who shares many character traits with popular Nordic detectives such as tendency to alcoholism, troubled family history which is slowly revealed to the reader and socialization problems, leading to temporal and meaningless personal relationships. The storyline is quite common with a teenage girl, Annabelle, being missing for a few days after attending a party in the small Swedish town of Gullspång where Charlie had also been raised by a mentally unstable mother. Charlie's personal story, concerning her family history will mingle with Annabelle's disappearance as it happens in many novels of the genre and in the final pages the connection between the two will become fully transparent. Though unoriginal, the plot is interesting enough to keep the reader's attention and in the second half of the book the pace becomes quicker and more suspenseful. Overall, it was a rather enjoyable read which also introduced a new name in the popular Swedish crime fiction scene.The loyal fans of the genre ought to check out this new author and hope for better books in the near future.

My precise rating would be closer to 3,5/5.

Another new author for me. This book is a slow burner to start with and at times it was too busy and spent too much time on the main character Charlie Lager who has been sent back to her childhood home to find a missing girl. Then all of sudden WHAM !!!!! This book took off like a rocket. All i can say is please stick with this book you will not be disappointed. The climax of this story was not what I was expecting it was explosive and heartbreaking. Personally i feel that the story is not finished and i am intrigued to find out what this author does next????
I would like to thank the author Lina Bengtsdotter, Orion Publishing Group and Net.galley for giving me the opportunity to read this book in return for giving an honest review.

Scandi noir is not my usual genre.
I enjoyed this book, it’s translated well. It was a little slow to start but then picked up and had lots of twists and turns that left me gripped.
I enjoyed thank you

Thank you to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for this arc in exchange for an honest review.
As soon as I started reading this book, I wondered whether I had made a wrong choice. It contains quite a lot of swearing, which I wasn't prepared for, but looking passed that, I thought it was a really good book. Scandi noir isn't my usual genre as it is a bit dark, with this book being no exception!
I was hooked in from the beginning, and the story compelled me to keep on reading to the end.

There's not a lot of originality in Lina Bengtsdotter's debut thriller set in the backwoods of Sweden. Charline Lager - 'Charlie' Lager - the hard drinking lead detective with family issues is a bit of a walking cliché but she certainly has character and, with her background outside of the normal career ladder, you can see how she got where she is and how she has the potential to add a different perspective in future cases. The investigation into a missing girl in For the Missing might be a little straightforward then but there's some degree of insight in Bengtsdotter, and its this insight into how social backgrounds can lead to crime without the perpetrator even having the awareness that they are committing a crime that is what the novel really has going for it.

It's the disappearance of Annabelle Roos, a seventeen year old girl living in Gullspang, a small manufacturing town of some 6,000 inhabitants that brings Charlie back to the neighbourhood where she grew up in an unstable family background, one she couldn't wait to escape. She finds that little has changed in almost twenty years, that the same family who owns the factory still holds influence and sway, and that the youths of the town still get their illicit kicks in the same way and the same places. It's that kind of insight that might lead Charlie to get understand what happened to Annabelle when she left a party and walked home in a dishevelled and vulnerable state.

That's something that Charlie can perhaps also identify with even now. 33 years old, Charlie drinks too much and has a somewhat promiscuous lifestyle, using both vices as a means of self-medication. As if that isn't a big enough threat to her ability to carry out her job as a Stockholm police detective effectively, Charlie has also made the mistake of having an affair with a married officer colleague, and the break-up and fall-out of that relationship is starting to make uncomfortable waves. It seems that Charlie is always running away from past mistakes, but the latest one has taken her back to the one place where she has perhaps the most to regret.

As far as a crime thriller goes, For the Missing is fairly standard and straightforward in its writing and characterisation. Even the nature of life in a small town isn't particularly new or revealing. The novel however is fairly successful in his handling of all the different elements at play here; from Charlie's unprofessionalism and drinking inevitably compromising her ability to investigate effectively, from her own background history also feeding into the case, and in the strangely unconnected story of two young girls, Rosa and Alice. In all of the stories however there is a connection of children and young people trying to establish friendships and relationships, of trying to live a normal childhood against a background of deprivation and family instability.

The investigation of Annabelle's disappearance perhaps even reveals more about the town and the people in the town than it does as the principal crime to be solved. That doesn't mean that it falls into the background, but it does appear to be the thing that brings all the other elements out into the open. That sounds a little bit like Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks and in a rather more conventional way For the Missing does set about revealing the darker nature of life in small towns, the secrets that everyone knows but no one talks about, the abuse and alcoholism, old histories and families. While it remains focussed on the story, it does raise the question of who is responsible really for the social ills of such places.

You might also wonder whether such problems are passed along genetically, as this is very much the concern with Charlie revisiting her old haunts and friends, the revelations she experiences now as an adult, and tries to connect them to the fact of her own life being an absolute mess. For the Missing does well to establish that, and even though there's a lot of familiar situations in Lina Bengtsdotter's debut Charlie Lager case, the treatment feels related to true life experience rather than crime fiction convenience, and that's not a bad way to start.

Detective Charlie Lager is sent back to her hometown of Gullspang to help local police with the case of a missing 17 year old girl, Annabelle, who went missing after a party. As Charlie begins to investigate the case with her partner, Anders Bratt, she has to confront ghosts from her own past.

Scandi Noir is not my usual genre, and I would say that this is more of a mystery than a crime novel. The investigation into Annabelle's disappearance is not the main focus of the book. We learn all about Charlie, and her early life with an alcoholic mother, and turning to drugs, alcohol and promiscuity in later life. Annabelle seems to be a good girl but we soon find out that she has her own secrets. The setting of the book is quite bleak,. There's nothing much to do in Gullspang, it seems, except drink.!

I thought the book was very well written, It is an English translation of a book originally released in Sweden., and the translation is very good.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the Orion Publishing Group for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

She must find Annabelle. Before it's too late.
The award-winning, global bestselling Swedish crime debut about a missing girl, and the detective who must return home and confront her darkest secrets in order to find her.

Nora's daughter Annabelle has disappeared, last seen on her way home from a party.
Gullspång's inexperienced police are wilting under the national media spotlight - and its residents desperate for answers. Stockholm DI Charlie Lager must return home to find Annabelle, and then get out of town as soon as she can. Before everyone discovers the truth about her.

Can Charlie find Annabelle before her darkest secrets are brought to light? FOR THE MISSING, time is running out...
This was the first Scandi crime thriller that I've ever read and I think I'll be looking into more thrillers of this nature! It was a quick read that made you want to keep reading until you found Annabelle.

Thanks to #NetGalley for the ARC of #ForTheMissing
Pub Date: 13 Dec 2018

Fascinating book. It could be a bit of a stereotype - kickass but self-destructive woman detective goes home and finds secrets and lies - but the setting is really well described and the main character is a winner. A smart girl from a troubled family has disappeared in a small and dismal factory town in rural Sweden. We also follow two young girls who are tiptoeing toward doing something really terrible, one leading the other on. A detective who grew up in that run-down factory town is sent to investigate. She hates the town where she grew up with a manic and disturbed mother, but she understands it, and she eventually works out not only what happened to the missing girl but who her own mother really was. I thought it was quite striking and an original addition to the Scandi noir canon.

The search for a missing girl in rural Sweden forms the backdrop to this intelligent crime story from Lina Bengtsdotter. A teenager, Anabelle, has not returned home from a wild party in a down-at-heel town in deepest Sweden. DI Charline “Charlie” Lager and her colleague Anders have been sent to investigate.

Nearly everyone involved in this procedural is troubled. We first meet Charlie recovering from a monumental hangover and one-night stand. But that’s as nothing to the goings on in Gullspång, where the town’s teenagers are drinking nearly as much as their parents, everyone reliant on the local paper mill for a living, and under-age sex and drugs are very much on the cards.

Inevitably the police initially get nowhere, but not everyone is being as helpful as they might. At the same time, Charlie is facing up to the face that she’s returning to the town of her childhood – somewhere she hoped she would never return to again.

Everywhere you turn in this novel, there are ghosts of what happened before, and it probably wasn’t pretty.
The book moves along quite nicely, and it has a structure that sends the reader forwards and backwards in time as we learn what really happened. I found the book highly readable, with it portraying a depressing picture of a part of the Swedish countryside that I found convincing.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Orion, for an ARC.

For the Missing is a gripping, tense mystery by a new author who I would happily read again in the future. It's a very atmospheric book and the tension grows and grows up to a stunning conclusion. Recommended!

I am not sure what to say about this book. As I read it I had a little trouble following bit eventually it fell into place. The mystery the intrigue in this book left we questioning everything and everyone. the end left me questioning even more. What? Who? How? Will anything be solved or will the questions remain?
Thank you for allowing me to read this.

DI Charlie Lager has been sent to investigate the case of Annabelle, a teenage girl who has gone missing. The trouble is Charlie grew up in the very town that Annabelle has gone missing from, and as she gets closer to the truth about Annabelle her own ghosts from the past start to appear.
I struggled a bit with this book from the very start. I felt disconnected from the characters, II couldn’t work out what was happenening sometimes and I had to go back to reread some parts because it seemed to jump very quickly from one part to another. I did finish it however, because I wanted to find out what had happened but the ending was also a let down for me.
Many thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Lena Bengtsdotter another author in what seems a current trend of Swedish crime thrillers. A thoroughly enjoyable read, a very intriguing storyline recommended and not to be missed.

I don't usually read Scandi Crime, so when the book started rather slowly, I wondered if I had made a mistake in choosing this book. It didn't take long before the pace quickened and I was very glad I had done so!

I found the characters believable and the plot kept me engrossed, even though it was a rather depressing tale of misspent young lives and the inevitable consequences they have to bear. There were other storylines that kept the whole book moving along very smoothly and it was very well translated.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

Unsure about this novel. Slow to start but picked up as the story progressed with a few red herrings along the way Can’t really put my finger on it but I didn’t really connect with Charlie or Anders so a bit lacking for me. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the chance to review it.

When I started reading this I was worried that this was a formula that had been successfully followed by other authors already. A slightly broken female police officer with a trauma in their past that was slowly revealed. However this felt like an original voice, the characters were believable and the storyline really kept my attention. The story became more than just a police procedural and had separate strands running that became more dominant as the book progressed.

I enjoyed the writing style, nothing felt excessive or over complicated and the characters were well formed. The pace was perfectly pitched, there was no spare dialogue and the story moved along at an enjoyable pace.

The chapters were a bit confusing at times. I usually love stories that swap between timelines and characters but feel this may have been more effective if the chapters were called the name of the character narrating them, maybe the print edition would be easier to follow than on kindle.

The ending somehow left me feeling a bit cheated. It was good and different to what I had expected but it felt a little rushed. I still enjoyed the book and would recommend.