Beginning with the death of an unknown American citizen in Stockholm, Persson slowly unravels the complex web of international espionage, greed, sheer incompetence, and work by a poorly constructed Swedish intelligence force that in this fiction lead to the murder of the Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme.

Stockholm, 1999. Lars Johannson, a new recruit to the Swedish Security Police, has reopened the files on one of the most renowned cases in Swedish history - the 1975 siege of the West German embassy. Back in 1989, the murder of a Swedish civil servant was covered up by corrupt officials, but ten years later Detectives Anna Holt and Bo Jarnebring are still not prepared to let it lie. Working with Lars, they discover a network of corruption and greed that permeates the very highest level of Swedish society. This astonishing thriller spans twenty-five years and hinges on the real-life, still-unsolved murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.

From the grand master of Scandinavian crime fiction—and one of the best crime writers of our time—here is the final volume in the critically acclaimed Story of a Crime trilogy, centered on the assassination of Olof Palme in 1986. It’s August 2007, and Lars Martin Johansson, chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden, is determined once again to reopen the dusty files on the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Palme. With his retirement quickly approaching, Johansson forms a new group, comprised of a few trustworthy detectives who doggedly wade through mountains of paperwork and pursue new leads in a case that has all but gone cold despite the open wound the assassination has left on the consciousness of Swedish society. But the closer the group gets to the truth, the more Johansson compromises the greater good for personal gain, becoming a pawn in the private vendetta of a shady political spin doctor. A detailed and boldly plotted police procedural, Free Falling, As If in a Dream lifts the veil on one of history’s greatest unsolved crimes, bringing dark humor, suspense, and wit to bear on a case long thought to have no answers.

***WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION'S INTERNATIONAL DAGGER 2017*** ***WINNER OF THE DANISH ACADEMY OF CRIME WRITERS' PALLE ROSENKRANTZ PRIZE (Best Crime Novel 2012)*** ***WINNER OF THE FINNISH ACADEMY OF CRIME WRITERS' AWARD (Best Crime Novel 2012)*** ***WINNER OF THE GLASS KEY (Best Scandinavian Crime Novel 2011)*** ***WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY OF CRIME WRITERS' AWARD (Best Crime Novel of the Year 2010)*** LARS MARTIN JOHANSSON is a living legend. Cunning and perceptive, always one step ahead, he was known in the National Criminal Police as “the man who could see around corners.” But now Johansson is retired, living in the country, his police days behind him. Or so he thinks. After suffering a stroke, Johansson finds himself in the hospital. Tests show heart problems as well. And the only thing that can save him from despair is his doctor’s mention of an unsolved murder case from years before. The victim: an innocent nine-year-old girl. Johansson is determined to solve the case, no matter his condition. With the help of his assistant, Matilda, an amateur detective, and Max, an orphan with a personal stake in the case, he launches an informal investigation from his hospital bed. Racing against time, he uncovers a web of connections that links sex tourism to a dead opera singer and a self-made millionaire. And as Johansson draws closer to solving the crime, he finds that he will have to confront not just a mystery but his own mortality as well.

Sophie Newton is determined to prove herself to her father, who insists she could never run a successful business. She throws herself into her beachside taco stand, The Sandy Tortilla, and makes it her primary goal to show him that he’s wrong, one burrito at a time. When she loses her summer help, Sophie rushes to find a warm body to help take orders. She finds that body—and what a body!—in Montgomery Winters, a struggling actor from LA. It may not be show business, but Mont figures he can write an order for fish tacos. The money’s dead useful, though he finds it’s the curvy company that really keeps him around. As Sophie and Mont work together, they discover an intense attraction between them. But when Mont's agent calls him about a career-making audition, he decides he must pursue the opportunity, even though he can't get Sophie out of his head. Now, Sophie must choose between chasing after the man she's falling for and the business she's fought so hard to build.

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

A young man falls to his death from a window in a student dorm in Stockholm, his loose shoe striking and killing the little dog being taken for his evening walk by an old man. It seems to be a mundane suicide—at least that’s what the police choose to think. But the young man is American, not Swedish, and there are a couple of odd things about his room when they search it. . . . From these tiny beginnings, Leif GW Persson slowly begins to unravel a puzzle that gets larger and larger as it becomes more and more complex, until it sweeps us into a web of international espionage, backroom politics, greed, sheer incompetence, and the shoddy work of Sweden’s intelligence force that leads to the murder of the prime minister. The first novel in a dark and dazzling trilogy that has become the defining fictional account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme—an event that triggered the biggest criminal investigation in recorded history—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a riveting insider’s combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural by a writer universally acknowledged as Sweden’s leading criminologist.