Detective Inspector Embla Nystrom Books in Order

The Detective Inspector Embla Nystrom series shifts Helene Tursten’s crime fiction out of big-city Gothenburg and into forests, small towns, and borderlands. Embla is a twenty-something detective in a mobile crimes unit, a talented hunter, and a Nordic light-welterweight boxing champion who channels restless energy into both sport and police work.

The first book, Hunting Game, opens with what should be a relaxing annual moose hunt at her uncle’s cabin in rural Dalsland. Embla joins relatives and old friends for a week in the woods, only to find tensions flaring around a handsome newcomer and old grudges. When unsettling pranks escalate into disappearances and a hunter turns up dead in the lake, she ends up running an off-the-clock murder investigation in a landscape she thought she knew.

In Winter Grave, Embla is back on duty in the coastal town of Stromstad just before Christmas when a nine-year-old girl vanishes after getting a ride from a withdrawn teenage boy. Soon a second child disappears, a police officer is killed, and an arson attack leaves the suspect’s father dead. The case tests not only her skills but also the limits of a community on the edge of panic.

Snowdrift picks up the thread of Embla’s deepest trauma: the disappearance of her best friend Lollo when they were teenagers. A late-night phone call suggests Lollo might still be alive, just as a gang member tied to that old case is found murdered in rural Sweden and his brother is killed the same night. Chasing the surviving brother across borders, Embla tries to solve the present-day shootings and finally learn what happened to the girl she could not save.

Together, the Embla books mix tightly plotted police work with rugged outdoor scenes: tracking suspects through snowstorms, breaking down what really happens on a hunt, and depicting small towns where everyone knows more than they say. Embla’s nightmares, complicated love life, and fierce loyalty to her found family make her a different kind of lead than Irene Huss, but just as grounded.

Readers who like Nordic noir with strong sense of place and a recurring cold case running under multiple books will find a lot to enjoy here. Starting with Hunting Game and reading forward lets you watch Embla work through old wounds even as each novel delivers its own self-contained mystery.