Hans Koppel- You’re Mine Now

Anna and Magnus have a happy marriage, but when, in a moment of madness, Anna has a brief fling with Erik, a man she met at a work conference, she lives to regret more than just her infidelity. Erik is a disturbed individual who goes to extreme lengths to get Anna’s attention, including kidnapping her ten-year-old daughter and attacking her mother. Before she knows it, Anna’s life is in the grip of this psychopathic stalker and she must try desperately to escape his clutches before it’s too late…

Having thoroughly enjoyed Hans Koppel’s UK debut She’s Never Coming Back which focussed on a woman kidnapped and held prisoner opposite her own home, with a CCTV link enabling her to see her family’s distress at her abduction, I was as keen as mustard to read this one. In You’re Mine Now  Koppel puts his own spin on the Fatal Attraction type tale where a comparatively rational wife and mother embarks on a short lived sexual entanglement with the mysterious uber-fit Scandinavian Adonis Erik, (well who wouldn’t?), which judging by the extremely creepy opening scene to the novel, can only end in a bad way for all concerned…

There is a good building of tension throughout as Anna seeks to extricate herself from the clutches of Erik who is slowly inveigling himself in the more personal areas of her life. Following the good intentioned actions of her own mother in the whole affair and what results from this action, Anna soon comes to realise that the sins of the flesh are sometimes best avoided. I liked the way that Koppel slowly reveals the true nature of Erik’s character and equally the claustrophobic atmosphere that begins to surround Anna and her family as she seeks to conceal the truth of her dalliance from her husband Magnus, and her daughter. The characterisation supports the menace of the plot well, with Anna’s mother and her work colleagues particularly well-realised and believable characters, and although I did find Anna herself a little one dimensional, Koppel makes Erik creepy enough to counterbalance this slight flaw. I also enjoyed the little flickers of humour that Koppel injects particularly in relation to the usefulness of Ikea in supplying the perfect kit for body disposal! The only disappointment for me was the slightly hackneyed ending which was signposted quite early on, and I felt that with Erik’s strength of character and purpose that the ending could have been somewhat braver. I’m sorry to say that it just left me feeling a little flat after the shocking denouement of Koppel’s previous book, and I thought he might have taken a bit more of a risk with it. Overall though, I did enjoy the book for what it was, and there was certainly enough within the plot to hold my interest, and that of fellow Scandinavian crime fiction fans.

Hans Koppel is a pseudonym for an established Swedish author, Petter Lidbeck, who was born in 1964 and lives in Stockholm. You’re Mine Now is published in the UK by Sphere- a division of Little Brown. http://www.goodreads.com/author 

(I bought this copy of the book)