Kristina Ohlsson Books in Order

If you want to follow her main police series: Unwanted → Silenced → The Disappeared → Hostage → The Chosen → The Flood.
If you like hard edged legal thrillers: Buried Lies → The Lies We Tell.
If you prefer creepy mysteries for younger readers (around 9-12): The Glass Children → The Silver Boy.
If you just want a quick sense of her style: Unwanted or Buried Lies.

Kristina Ohlsson grew up in Kristianstad in southern Sweden as one of six siblings in a busy household where books were everywhere and long stretches of childhood illness left her plenty of time to read. She was born there in 1979 and early on became fascinated by foreign affairs and security politics.

After finishing school she left her hometown for university, studying political science and international relations in Gothenburg and later completing a master's degree in political science and crisis management at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm. That mix of politics, crisis planning, and law would later feed directly into the stories she wrote.

Before she ever thought of herself as a novelist, Ohlsson worked as an analyst and civil servant for the Swedish Security Service, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Swedish National Defence College, and eventually as a counterterrorism officer for the Organization for Security and Co operation in Europe in Vienna. The job meant long days, heavy responsibility, and a front row seat to how countries respond when threats stop being abstract.

While still working in security and foreign policy, she began to write crime fiction in her spare time. Those early pages became Unwanted, published in 2009, which introduced investigative analyst Fredrika Bergman and set Ohlsson on a new path as a full time writer.

The Fredrika Bergman books follow a small Stockholm task force led by police superintendent Alex Recht while Fredrika, an outsider with an academic background, learns to trust her instincts inside a very traditional police culture. Across novels like Unwanted, Silenced, The Disappeared, Hostage, The Chosen, and The Flood, the team works cases that mix intimate tragedies with questions about migration policy, terrorism, and how far a state should go in the name of security.

With the Martin Benner series she shifted closer to the legal thriller. In Buried Lies and The Lies We Tell, high flying defense lawyer Martin Benner is pulled into the case of alleged serial killer Sara Texas and her missing young son, and the story digs into power, money, and the moral compromises that sit just under the surface of a polished legal career.

Around the same time Ohlsson started writing for younger readers. The Glass Children and its follow ups bring together ghost story elements, small town Swedish settings, and friendships between kids who insist on asking hard questions even when adults look the other way.

Her children's suspense novels have been recognized with national prizes, including a major children's novel award in 2013 and a crime fiction prize for young readers in 2017, while her early crime fiction won a regional prize for southern Swedish crime writers in 2010.

The Fredrika Bergman series has also made it to television in the form of the Swedish drama Stockholm Requiem, which brings her Stockholm detectives and their cases to the screen and has helped introduce new readers to the books.

Today Ohlsson lives in Stockholm and writes full time. She moves back and forth between adult crime novels and spooky adventures for children, but the core of her work stays the same, asking what ordinary people do when institutions fail them and how past choices echo through families, cities, and entire countries.