Kjell Eriksson Books in Order

If you want the best first Ann Lindell entry: The Princess of Burundi → The Cruel Stars of the Night → The Hand That Trembles
If you want the earlier Lindell years: Stone Coffin → The Princess of Burundi → The Cruel Stars of the Night
If you prefer the darker later cases: Black Lies, Red Blood → Open Grave
If you want the modern comeback books: The Night of the Fire → The Deathwatch Beetle

Kjell Eriksson was born in Uppsala in 1953 and grew up in Almtuna, on Ymergatan, in a working-class family. His father worked on the railway and his mother was a shop assistant. That background stayed with him. Even when he later became known for crime fiction, he kept returning to ordinary jobs, class tensions, and the quiet pressure of daily life.

He came to writing later than many readers might guess.

Before becoming a full-time novelist, Eriksson worked as a construction worker and gardener, and for years ran a garden center outside Uppsala. He was also active in union politics and wrote for the agricultural workers' paper Lantarbetaren. He knew manual labor from the inside, and that practical knowledge gave his fiction a grounded feel. In interviews, he has said that work done with the hands is often underestimated, and you can feel that belief in the texture of his books.

His fiction debut came in 1993 with Knäppgöken. A few years later he turned to crime novels and introduced police inspector Ann Lindell in Den upplysta stigen, which won the Swedish Crime Academy's prize for best first novel. Eriksson has said he had mostly written about men before that, and wanted the challenge of creating a woman at the center of the story. Lindell became the character readers know him for best.

That series carried his name far beyond Sweden.

For many English-language readers, the door in is The Princess of Burundi, a snowy, tense case that also won Sweden's award for best crime novel. From there, books like The Cruel Stars of the Night, The Demon of Dakar, Black Lies, Red Blood, and Open Grave show what he does especially well. The crimes matter, but so do the people around them, colleagues, families, drifters, workers, and neighbors who carry their own grief, grudges, and compromises. The later Ann Lindell books, The Night of the Fire and The Deathwatch Beetle, return to those same strengths in a changed Sweden.

His novels are often set in and around Uppsala, but the setting is never just backdrop. He uses city streets, villages, coastlines, and farms to show how place shapes a life. Again and again, he returns to class, labor, loneliness, migration, and the gap between public decency and private damage. Even when the plot is built around a murder investigation, he is usually looking at something wider, how people live, who gets left behind, and what old wounds a community would rather not name.

Eriksson has also written outside the detective form, including the autobiographical Simma i mörker and the historical novel Att skjuta hästar. In 2013 he received the Ivar Lo prize, which suits a writer so tied to questions of work, solidarity, and social change. Those non-crime books make it even clearer that detective fiction was never his only lane.

These days he lives in Brazil, and has spoken about writing in the mornings and spending the rest of the day with family and in the garden. That feels fitting. After all the murders, investigations, and hard questions in his fiction, there is still a gardener in the middle of the work, someone interested in soil, weather, and the slow way a place shapes the people who live there.