Studio Sex

When freelance reporter Annika Bengtzon gets a call that a murdered woman's body is lying in a Stockholm graveyard, she knows immediately that this story might be her ticket to the permanent job she craves. Annika's position at the big-city tabloid is tenuous and her mother and boyfriend want her to come back to the local paper she has worked for, to stay near home and settle down. As she pursues the murderer, battling the male-dominated cliques of the newsroom, Annika must also overcome her own inexperience and the instincts that will draw her much too close to the story. "Studio Sex" is the prequel to Liza Marklund's international bestseller "The Bomber" that also featured Annika Bengtzon. "Studio Sex" inhabits the same cutthroat world of the tabloid reporter, rendered with precision and intelligence by Sweden's most popular novelist. But "Studio Sex" also introduces fascinating new terrain for most American readers, that of a political scandal in one of Europe's most solidly Social Democratic welfare states. When the political imbroglio seems to intersect with what happened at a Stockholm sex club, the cover-ups and switchbacks can be cherished by thriller readers the world over. Over the course of an unusually scorching Swedish summer, Annika Bengtzon will exhaustively follow every lead to uncover the murderer of the young woman in the graveyard. At the same time, she will also try to discover what she wants for herself and whether she has what it takes to survive and thrive as an investigative reporter. Her choices, her victories, and her mistakes make her one of the more complicated -- even fragile -- heroines to emerge in recent years.