Two Soldiers

With over 4 million copies sold worldwide and translated in 28 languages, The New York Times bestselling authors, ex-con Börge Hellström and investigative journalist Anders Roslund, combine inside knowledge of the brutal realities of criminal life with searing social criticism in complex, intelligent plots that have propelled them into the forefront of international crime writing. Now in Two Soldiers, comes an explosive thriller of drugs, gang warfare, and two fatherless teenage boys on the wrong side of the law. In a bleak Stockholm suburb where juvenile gang crime is rapidly on the rise, two 19-year-old boys, best friends since third grade and drug addicts since age 9, have spent their young lives establishing a ruthless criminal enterprise—known as the Råby Warriors. With the recruitment of children as foot soldiers, the Warriors are now poised to become the most powerful syndicate in the region. Twenty years on the force, José Pereira now heads the Organized Crime and Gang Section in Råby. If it was not so deadly, Pereira might appreciate the absurdity of watching boys like Leon and Gabriel, raised on Hollywood images, morph themselves into characterizations of gangsters. After Leon and Gabriel execute a maximum-security prison break, in which a female guard is kidnapped and feared murdered, Pereira is joined in his investigation by Chief Superintendent Ewert Grens, whom Roslund and Hellström readers will recognize as the maverick detective who never gives up. For Grens, this case awakens troubled ghosts from his past. Soon all four men are on a violent collision course that will irrevocably change all their lives.