An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good
Maud is eighty-eight years old. She may be gaining in years, but she still has all her faculties, travels the world at her leisure, and is fully capable of climbing some scaffolding when the need arises, thank you very much.
As a result of a specially negotiated lease agreement after her father’s death, she has lived rent-free in the same spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg, Sweden, since she was a child — much to the consternation of her neighbors. Yet this luxurious apartment building has recently seen its fair share of death.
Determined to preserve her privacy and protect the things she holds dear, Maud finds an inventive way to resolve the problems that keep cropping up: she simply offs them. But as her body count grows, local detectives are narrowing their gaze on her. What’s a simple old lady to do?
In this delightfully morbid collection of linked short stories, Helene Tursten introduces readers to a new type of cold-blooded killer — because sometimes evil walks with a walker.
Quote:
“Broadly speaking, everyone Maud met these days spoke loudly and articulated with exaggerated clarity. They automatically assumed she was deaf, which she most definitely was not. Nor was she senile. But she had learned that it was smart not to reveal that all her senses were in full working order; instead, she allowed people to act in accordance with their own preconceptions. This was often a useful source of information, and Maud could form her own opinion of the person and the situation. But this time she didn’t exactly adopt her usual approach. Later on, Maud would blame it on the fact that she had been completely taken by surprise. Perhaps there was also a certain amount of curiosity about her famous neighbor. In any case, that was when she made her first mistake. She let her visitor into the apartment.”
Author:
Helene Tursten is the author of two detective novel series featuring characters Irene Huss and Embla Nyström, and two books following her octogenarian character Maud, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good and An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed. Tursten lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Published: 2018
Length: 174 pages
Set in: Gothenburg, Sweden