The story is very exciting and multi-layered. It jumps from now to then, which irritated me at the beginning because I didn't immediately see the connection with the loose threads. Over time, however, it was great fun to make this leap in time and my thoughts began to see the connections better and better.
Leo Junker is a suspended policeman in whose block of flats a murder took place. He couldn't resist and rushed to the flat to investigate himself. He discovered a necklace that looked familiar to him and so began the time jump in this crime thriller.
We get to know Grim and Julia, who are closely linked to Junker's fate.
Despite Junker's suspension, he is inwardly driven to investigate himself and puts himself and those following him in great danger.

Written in a very exciting and varied way. I will certainly read the other books as well. ( )

Leo Junker is a cop on suspension after a raid that went badly wrong, with him killing a colleague. One night, there is a murder in the building he lives in, and his curiosity leads him to enter the crime scene. The result is that he leaves traces at the scene, and suspicion falls on him.

Although he has an explanation, it is a weak one that gets weaker as further evidence emerges that seems to implicate him. As the full glare of the investigation is turned on him, he receives an anonymous text that seems to be from the killer, baiting him. Leo digs, and starts to realise that this is all somehow connected to incidents in his troubled childhood in the tenements of Stockholm.

The plot is pretty ordinary, with some overly-obvious developments and a bit of irrelevant silliness at the climax, that could have been edited out. Leo never really gets ahead of the criminal in this book, so it reads a bit like a straight-line procedural, with few satisfying twists. I liked Leo as a character though; he is comprehensively messed up, the way all Scandinavian cops should be. He's probably worth sticking with and reading the second book in the series. ( )

Välskriven och lite annorlunda thriller med bra tecknade karaktärer. En bok där inte slutet är uppenbart efter några sidor. ( )

Simple sentences and not trying too hard - at creating interesting, complex characters and a good plot - made this book roll, and it was a very quick read. A step away from what's drab in bad, older crime novels, which can at times read like a blueprint of the innards of a prejudiced mind. This one was interesting until the end. ( )

I'm now firmly of the opinion that it takes real skill to stuff up the order of a series to the extent that I seem to manage to do it. One day I'll find a use for that skill, but nowadays it just means I spend my life staring at piles of books thinking, oh buggeration, there's another one I should have read before... Thus THE INVISIBLE MAN FROM SALEM.

Which is the first in the Leo Junker series, a series which I've read in the order THE FALLING DETECTIVE (#2); MASTER, LIAR, TRAITOR, FRIEND (#3) (so at least that was right), then THE INVISIBLE MAN FROM SALEM (#1) and now I've got THE THIN BLUE LINE (#4) to go. Fortunately, none of the mis-ordered reading mattered (exploration of this below). This is an excellent series, dark and very noirish in styling, set in Stockholm, featuring disgraced Internal Affairs officer Leo Junker.

This case, that of a young woman murdered in a refuge on the ground floor of his apartment building, he bluffs / forces / inserts himself into the crime scene when sheer curiosity takes over from any possible police rules. The dead woman is clutching a necklace, one that turns out to be very intimately connected to him, and to his childhood, and one that he really didn't need to be anywhere near once it was found in the hands of a dead young woman. What started out as a seemingly random killing, or a domestic, or something connected to the drugs underworld, then takes Junker back to his troubled youth in the Stockholm suburb of Salem, back to a lurking presence from that past, and what seems like a very personal vendetta against his present.

Having been mightily intrigued by THE FALLING DETECTIVE, and pretty well hooked by MASTER, LIAR, TRAITOR, FRIEND going back to book number one in the series definitely filled in some gaps in my understanding of the central character - Leo Junker - and made me think long and hard about how readers connect with a series overall. This opening salvo sets up the story of Junker in a very noirish manner. A lone wolf, world weary, disgraced, suspended police officer with a medical issue, he's repressed, self-absorbed, convinced of his own rightness, even when confronted with his wrongness and oddly determined to keep the world at bay, whilst never actually being able to leave well enough alone.

Whether or not this would have been an opening to a series that would have grabbed my interest as hard as the first and second books did is hard to say. By the later books author Christoffer Carlsson had settled into a style - noir in flavour, Swedish in delivery that dodged some of the familiar tropes more evident in this first novel, although I did find the clever, forceful, tattooed ex-lover an interesting little hat tip. There's also something in this novel that suggests, subtly, that Junker actually couldn't give a monkey's what anyone thinks - including the reader, which is both slightly off-putting and mightily intriguing all at the same time.

If you're coming to the Leo Junker series in the correct order, and you're feeling any of the slight quibbles I felt then I can only suggest that you press on with haste. If you're coming to the series in the correct order, and you've not experienced a single one of the slight quibbles, then I wouldn't be at all surprised about that either. I'm certainly intending to read novel number 4 as soon as I possibly can. This is a good series, which has the potential to be a great series indeed.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/invisible-man-salem-christoffer-carlsson ( )