For nearly four decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries - Sweden, Norway, and Denmark - was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both existed and did not exist. With vivid storytelling and an astonishing command of the literature, Wendy Lesser's Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery illuminates the vast, peculiar world of this imagined Scandinavia - first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and finally as it exists in reality.
