translated by K. L. Seegers
Some serious diversion might be in order now, because of the frenzied activity emanating from Washington, D.C., and … just February in general. It’s a good time to watch or read something you can get lost in.
While completely different in subject and tone—one is about a missing baby, the other about an ambitious heist—the Swedish TV series Snow Angels and the South African geopolitical police procedural Leo are engrossing enough to distract from whatever’s troubling you now. Because what these characters are going through is probably worse.
Having originally aired in 2021 and now streaming on MHz Choice, Snow Angels came early to the bad-mom discussion that’s spiking in the culture right now, posing pointed questions about a woman’s obligation as caregiver. On a frigid December day at Stockholm’s version of a housing project, a new mother awakens from her stupor to discover that her husband and infant son, Lucas, are missing. When the police arrive, Jenni (Josefin Asplund), tattooed, disheveled, and out of it, seems more interested in deflecting blame than she is upset about her baby’s disappearance.
It’s easy to judge Jenni, who is improbably gorgeous, more in the mode of a tragic heroine such as Anna Karenina than, say, Anna Nicole Smith. She leaves her baby outside in the freezing cold so she can’t hear his colicky crying, spends her days zonked out on valium, and throws a cocaine-fueled party that’s busted up by her hardworking husband, Salle (Ardalan Esmaili), who has no idea how to help her.
She’s not mother-of-the-year material, but the major clue that she’s not intrinsically a bad parent is her daughter, who is hearing-impaired and well taken care of. It seems clear that Jenni is self-medicating for postpartum depression, but social and medical services inexplicably ignore the condition.
Series creator Mette Heeno gives the women involved in Jenni’s case equal time, including Alice (Eva Melander), a detective easing up on her high-octane job to attend to her ailing husband, though a caregiver she’s not. Too good a cop to languish on the sidelines, Alice gravitates toward the center of the case, disagreeing with her colleagues about Jenni’s involvement when she’s arrested.
Then there’s Maria (Maria Rossing), a pediatric nurse who was assigned to Lucas and suspects spousal abuse and child neglect. Her priority is protecting her tiny patients, not coddling defensive parents, and though she tries to maintain a neutral professional front, sometimes the mask slips.
Snow Angels sets up its suspects with intriguing little crumbs, but as with any good whodunit, the possibilities shift as the picture widens and becomes more complex. Some of the scenes are Bergman-esque in their realism and intensity, with many close-ups and a tendency not to cut away from uncomfortable silences.
Jenni is so drug-addled that it’s hard to locate the person inside, but Asplund holds the camera with her forlorn beauty. In the trickier character of the nurse, Rossing is quietly devastating. She’s always taken care of the most vulnerable, including her brain-damaged brother, but at what cost to herself?
Ultimately, the system fails just about everyone in Snow Angels, and it’s up to the shattered individuals to make their own way in the wake of that breakdown.
Some of the scenes in the Swedish TV series Snow Angels, which poses questions about a woman’s obligation as caregiver, are Bergman-esque in their realism and intensity.
The system failed more spectacularly a decade ago in South Africa, where wealthy private interests influenced the government to make policy favorable to them in what’s known as “state capture.” It’s essentially what Elon Musk is doing with the U.S. government right now. Deon Meyer’s Leo addresses this corruption through the lens of a heist, or two heists, actually—one that opens the book with a bang, and an even more ambitious effort later on. Backgrounding them are two murders—one of a college girl on a mountain-biking trail; the other, of the suspect in her murder, a man who may or may not be a lawyer, who’s been suffocated by filler foam, which looks like a message.
The murders present police detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido with the kind of challenge they’ve missed in lovely but placid Stellenbosch, far from Cape Town, where they had been part of an elite force known as the Hawks. But the lack of any obvious connection between the mountain-bike girl and the suspect has them stymied.
Meanwhile, Meyer has introduced the heist crew, with special attention to its only woman, Chrissie Jaeger, an alluring wildlife guide who serves as the honey trap, though she has other talents. The fact that the object of the robbery is the ill-gotten gains of a family who allegedly assisted the corrupt South African government (a situation borrowed directly from a real-life 2016 scandal) makes us root for the thieves. “There are no victims,” is the ringleader’s selling point.
Except there are, when the job goes haywire. But Chrissie manages to escape with enough money to set herself up quietly in a little house outside of Rome.
Enter the book’s scariest character, who has a message for his enemies: “Tau Berger is a handful.” (“Tau” means “lion” in several South African languages, a hint about the title.) He has learned about the murders of two comrades from the special forces, one of whom is the filler-foam victim, and he’s bent on revenge. After that there’s the planning of the second heist, which involves stealing a fortune from a surprising source with the help of the crew from the first one.
The question of who the real criminals are runs throughout the book, but it’s safe to say Tau is a law unto himself. He lives by a code, but it’s not a moral one.
Meyer is unusually adept at weaving plotlines together and making them all equally engaging. The central strand is the team of Benny and Vaughn, whose easygoing friendship doesn’t preclude a mutual streak of professional relentlessness. They don’t give up, even if it means that Benny’s focus on his upcoming wedding is less than laserlike.
Like a few other crime writers, Meyer uses his characters’ taste in music to illuminate their personalities. Chrissie, a loner and autodidact, is a classical-music obsessive with quite a sophisticated playlist. Benny is more a blues kind of guy, choosing a Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee song with which to serenade his bride at their wedding. In the thick of their perplexing investigation, Benny and Vaughn pause for a conversation about Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” It’s a bit like the digressive pop-culture discussions in Quentin Tarantino movies—part comic relief, part character revelation.
You’ve got to love a thriller that devotes as much attention to Lindsey Buckingham’s fingerpicking technique as it does to the best way to attach a plastic explosive to a car door.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
