Book excerpt: From the land of the midnight sun, a compelling and dark thriller by Sweden?s master of crime fiction: The autumn gloom comes quickly on the Swedish city of Gothenburg, and for Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter the days seem even shorter, the nights bleaker, when he is faced with two apparently unrelated sets of perplexing crimes. Mysterious assaults on college students in Gothenburg?s parks are carried out in the dark of the night, while during the day toddlers are abducted from their nursery schools and quickly returned, seemingly unharmed, before anyone even notices they are missing. Investigating these bizarre cases, D.C.I. Winter and his team follow their scant leads to ?the flats,? the barren prairies of rural Sweden, whose wastelands conceal crimes as sinister as the land itself. Winter must deduce the labyrinthine connections between the cases before the culprit?or is it culprits??closes in on his own family. Haunting and psychologically astute, Frozen Tracks is another triumph from the award- winning master of Swedish noir.