Sarah's Reviews > The Sandman

“The Sandman” works scarifyingly well as a stand-alone novel. I wasn't aware it was a series until after, but it doesn't seem to matter.

Detective Inspector Joona Linna an international sensation. Joona is blond and dimpled, with Special Ops training and eyes a granite shade of blue. There’s nothing ghoulish about him except the cases toward which his conscience is always dragging him. Serial killers, broken families and heartbreaking lost or tortured children are among his specialties, and “The Sandman” is an adroitly nerve-racking book full of all those things.

With its tight, staccato chapters and cast of dangerous wraiths lurking everywhere, “The Sandman” is a nonstop fright. It’s able to shift its focus frequently with no loss of tension. It begins about as harmlessly as it can, with a nice new doctor doing his first day’s work at a high-security hospital ward for the criminally insane.

(When you finish the book, take another look at that sentence.) This doctor’s biggest challenge is having to deal with Jurek

Walter, a frail old man who is this story’s version of Hannibal Lecter.
A prominent, hugely suspenseful part of the book involves embedding Saga Bauer, a brave, smart, beautiful cop whose role many actresses would covet, in the same tiny ward where Jurek is housed. She is to risk her life in hopes of finding out what he’s thinking. “You’re like a sister to me, Saga, but it would be better if you died than if he got out,” Joona tells her, and the frankness of that somehow makes the detective more lovable than cruel. He himself has already made huge sacrifices to this case, as we find out. He’s being an honest cop by telling Saga the truth, and she doesn’t flinch at it. She’s his peer when it comes to meeting this challenge.

By this point the book’s greatest tension comes from wondering whether either Joona or Saga is any match for this near-supernatural monster, who can implant thoughts in his victims’ heads or turn up as an apparition just staring into their windows. Scared yet? You will be.

Joona Linna is a character that you want to know as much about as you can.