The Missing

An ordinary outing takes Greta, Alex, and four-year-old Smilla across Sweden’s mythical Lake Malice to a tiny, isolated island. While father and daughter tramp into the trees, Greta stays behind in the boat, lulled into a reverie by the misty, moody lake…only later to discover that the two haven’t returned. Her frantic search proves futile. They’ve disappeared without a trace.

Greta struggles to understand their eerie vanishing. She desperately needs to call Alex, to be reassured that Smilla is safe, or contact the police. But now her cell phone is missing too. Back at her cottage, she finds it hidden away under the bedsheets. Had she done that? Or had someone else been in the cottage? But who, and why? As Greta struggles to put the pieces together, she fears that her past has come back to torment her, or she’s finally lost her grip on reality?

In this dark psychological thrill ride—with more twists than a labyrinth and more breathless moments than a roller coaster—Greta must confront what she’s always kept hidden if she has any hope of untangling the truth.

Caroline Eriksson holds a master’s degree in social psychology and worked for more than ten years in human-resource management before deciding to pursue writing, her childhood dream. Her first two novels are based on historical Swedish murder cases, and her debut, The Devil Helped Me, was nominated for Stora Ljudbokspriset (the Big Audiobook Prize) in 2014.

Caroline has lived all over the world. She attended high school in Quantico, Virginia; studied at the University of Adelaide in Australia; and now lives in Stockholm. She denies being a daredevil but admits that she once threw herself off a mountain in New Zealand in a hang-gliding experiment.

Her greatest adventure today is raising her two children, and she satisfies any residual wanderlust by exploring the most terrifying parts of life—its dark psychological elements—in her writing. The Missing is Caroline’s first psychological suspense thriller and her first book translated into English. She’s already hard at work on her next novel.

Tiina Nunnally is an American literary translator and author who has translated more than sixty works of fiction from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has served as an affiliate faculty member in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington.

Nunnally has received numerous awards for her work, including the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her best-known translation may be Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, which won the American Translators Association’s Lewis Galantière Prize.

The Swedish Academy has honored her for her contributions to “the introduction of Swedish culture abroad.” She was also appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her efforts on behalf of Norwegian literature in the United States.