Anders de la Motte Books in Order

If you want his breakthrough tech thrillers: Game → Buzz → Bubble
If you want police intelligence suspense: MemoRandom → Ultimatum
If you want rural Swedish mysteries: End of Summer → Deeds of Autumn → Dead of Winter → Rites of Spring
If you want a newer recurring detective: The Mountain King → The Glass Man

Anders de la Motte grew up in Billesholm in northwestern Skåne, in the part of Sweden that later became the backbone of many of his novels. His mother was a librarian, so books were never far away. That early mix of small-town life and constant reading shows up all through his work, especially in the novels set in the Skåne countryside.

He did not start out planning a literary life.

As a young man he moved to Stockholm, trained as a police officer, and worked in law enforcement there through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. After that he returned south and moved into security work, first at UPS and later in a senior security role for Dell in Copenhagen, with responsibility across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Those jobs gave him a strong feel for systems, pressure, risk, and the way people behave when the stakes rise fast.

Writing came later, and a little sideways. In interviews, de la Motte has said that his wife Anette pushed him to try writing something of his own. He started drafting novels in the late 2000s, and his third attempt became Game, the book that launched him in 2010 and won the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy award for best first novel.

That first breakthrough told readers a lot about what he could do.

The Game trilogy, Game, Buzz, and Bubble, is fast, restless, and plugged into internet-age anxiety. It follows Henrik "HP" Pettersson and his sister Rebecca Normén through a dangerous alternate reality game that feeds on attention, surveillance, and ego. Readers who like a strong pace tend to start there, because the books move quickly and keep turning the screws.

He took that same thriller energy into MemoRandom and Ultimatum, books built around intelligence work, secrecy, memory loss, and corruption. David Sarac, the main figure in those novels, works in the gray areas of policing, where no one tells the whole truth and trust is always expensive. De la Motte's background in policing and security gives these books a lived-in feel without making them read like manuals.

Then he shifted terrain. With End of Summer, Dead of Winter, Rites of Spring, and Deeds of Autumn, he moved into slower, more atmospheric crime fiction rooted in rural Skåne. These novels still have suspense, but they lean harder on place, family secrets, old crimes, and the way a close community can remember something and hide it at the same time. End of Summer was later adapted for television, which helped introduce this side of his work to an even wider audience.

More recently he launched the Leonore Asker books, beginning with The Mountain King and continuing with The Glass Man. These novels follow a detective pushed into the police basement, the Department of Lost Souls, where odd cold cases and forgotten places have a way of leading back to very human cruelty. They feel a bit stranger at the edges, but still grounded in the same sharp sense of tension that runs through all his work.

What links all these books is pretty simple. De la Motte likes pressure, hidden motives, and people who are not fully safe, not from others and not from themselves. His heroes and investigators are rarely polished. They are competent in one moment, impulsive in the next, and usually carrying more history than they want to admit.

He lives in Lomma, in Skåne, with his family, close to the landscapes that keep finding their way into his fiction. That seems fitting. Even when his stories range into intelligence units, tech conspiracies, or the darkest corners of a city, they still feel written by someone who knows what a small place remembers, and what it refuses to say out loud.