Mysteries to Die For Book Club: "The Hypnotist" by Lars Kepler

Join Elsie Souza for an international reading journey through the world's most captivating mysteries! The Mysteries to Die For Book Club is led by Elsie Souza, reading murder, mayhem, and marvelous prose. From Nordic noir to British whodunits, each book reveals how crime and storytelling cross borders, and what our favorite detectives can teach us about culture, justice, and the human heart. This month, we're reading Lars Kepler's The Hypnotist—a dark, relentlessly suspenseful Swedish thriller that begins with the brutal murder of a family outside Stockholm. One teenage boy survives the attack, but his injuries leave him unable to tell police what happened—and investigators fear that the killer may still be searching for the family's missing daughter. Detective Joona Linna turns to psychiatrist Erik Maria Bark, once known for his work with hypnosis, and persuades him to break a promise he made years ago never to hypnotize another patient. What the boy reveals under hypnosis sets off a chain of events that reaches far beyond the original crime, forcing long-buried secrets back into the open and putting Erik's own family in danger. The first book in Kepler's bestselling Joona Linna series, The Hypnotist is twisty, unsettling, and very hard to put down—a mystery that asks what can be hidden in the mind, and what happens when someone decides to go looking for it. ABOUT THE BOOK: #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first of the Killer Instinct series featuring Detective Joona Linna: a triple murder, the one surviving witness—a boy with no memory of what happened—and the hypnotist hired to help uncover the truth. “Full of surprises and more than enough twists to keep those pages turning well into the night.” —NPR The police are desperate for information on the triple homicide. Detective Joona Linna enlists the help of hypnotist Erik Maria Bark. But when Bark unlocks the secrets in the boy’s memory, he triggers a terrifying chain of events that will put all their lives in jeopardy. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: LARS KEPLER is the pseudonym of the critically acclaimed husband-and-wife team Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril. Their number one internationally best-selling Joona Linna series has sold more than twenty million copies in forty languages. The Ahndorils were both established writers before they adopted the pen name Lars Kepler, and they have each published several acclaimed novels. They live in Stockholm, Sweden.