The Asker Books in Order

The Asker books are built around Detective Leonore Asker, usually called Leo, a smart, abrasive investigator whose career takes a hard sideways turn at the start of the series. Instead of rising through major crime, she is pushed into the Department of Lost Souls, a basement police unit that deals with odd, neglected, or hard-to-classify cases. That setup gives the series a nice twist. These are police novels, but they are also stories about hidden spaces, forgotten people, and the cases other departments would rather ignore.

Leo does not work alone. A key figure in the series is Martin Hill, an old friend who moves between academic life and urban exploration. He helps her read places that other investigators miss, abandoned buildings, sealed rooms, model landscapes, ruined sites, and remote estates with histories that refuse to stay decorative. In The Mountain King, their work starts around a kidnapping and a trail of eerie miniature figures. In The Glass Man, it leads through a body found on Leo's father's farm and a separate thread at a secluded estate with an abandoned observatory.

The geography is never just scenery.

That is part of the series' appeal. De la Motte uses Malmö and southern Sweden as real physical spaces, but he also keeps opening doors into the overlooked parts of them, the basement archive, the ruined property, the hidden room, the half-forgotten network below the everyday city. Leo is a strong guide for that material because she is not neat or reassuring. She is ambitious, difficult, emotionally guarded, and still tangled up in a painful family history that keeps pressing into her cases.

The books balance a police-procedural spine with a darker, more atmospheric edge. There is folklore in the air, but the real danger is always human. Old grudges, damaged families, buried crimes, and the stories communities tell to keep going all have a way of feeding the present. Martin gives the series a different kind of investigative energy from a standard police partner, too. He notices structures, symbols, and spaces, while Leo handles pressure, instinct, and the rougher parts of the job.

So if you want a recurring detective series from de la Motte, this is the one. It has a strong central lead, a memorable supporting partner, and cases that feel eerie without drifting away from crime fiction. Read it in order, The Mountain King first, then The Glass Man, so you can watch Leo settle into the Department of Lost Souls while her own past keeps creeping in from the edges.