Rekke and Vargas

About the Rekke and Vargas series

Hans Rekke is a brilliant, erratic professor of interrogation psychology -- a world authority on reading suspects and detecting lies, and prone to breakdowns and self-destructive behaviour off the clock. Micaela Vargas is a young Stockholm police detective from a rough immigrant background, sharp and instinctive but boxed out of the cases she wants by department politics. When their paths cross on a case neither can solve alone, David Lagercrantz pairs them into a deliberately Holmes-and-Watson-inflected duo: Rekke's dazzling, unstable genius against Vargas's grounded procedural know-how.

Having already spent three novels continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, Lagercrantz built Rekke and Vargas as a series fully his own, openly modelled on Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson but relocated to contemporary Stockholm and the immigrant suburbs Vargas grew up in. The result leans further into psychological deduction and class tension than Millennium's corporate-conspiracy plotting, while keeping the same brisk, propulsive Scandinavian-thriller pacing.