A smorgasbord of thrillers: Who's the next Stieg Larsson?

All right, enough. Seal the borders. No more Swedish mysteries. Take your rain, your cold, your gloom, your police departments filled with interchangeable secondary characters, and go torture yourselves to death.

At least that's the feeling you're likely to get when the new wave of Swedish "thrillers," including Leif GW Persson's "Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime" (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95) and Åke Edwardson's "The Shadow Woman" (Penguin, $15 paper), hit our shores this fall. Sweden, of course, has been the fertile killing field of literary favorite Henning Mankell, creator of Inspector Kurt Wallander, and megasuccessful (albeit dead) Stieg Larsson, whose Millennium Trilogy novels were the must-read books of the summer.

These new Swedish mysteries may lack the virtues of Mankell and Larsson, but there is a mighty contender not far away in the equally desperate climes of Iceland - namely Arnaldur Indridason's "Hypothermia" (Minotaur, $24.99).

Here then a guide to the Nordic way of death, and how our three would-be chroniclers measure up.

No end in sight

Mankell's Kurt Wallander crime novels are models of tightly structured mysteries, setting things up with a hair-raising murder, which Wallander investigates while casting a jaundiced eye on Swedish politics and trying to make sense of a messy personal life. Larsson's books juggle more balls, but both rely on smartly realized central characters to keep things from falling apart.

Persson's police superintendent, Lars M. Johansson, is the closest thing to a central - or memorable - character in the 500-plus-page-epic "Between Summer's Longing." At least "The Shadow Woman," revolving around the death of a woman and the disappearance of her daughter, and "Hypothermia" are brought in under 400 and feature strong central police inspectors - Erik Winter and Erlendur Sveinsson, respectively. Erlendur, as he's called - Icelanders, we learn, address each other by first name - could give Wallander a run for his krona as he balances a suicide investigation with a cold case that parallels his brother's disappearance.

Say it in English

At their best, Larsson and Mankell write crisp, clear prose that keeps the action moving forward. Their translators have a fine grasp of American idiom. Not so Persson: "The gold watch around Waltin's wrist perhaps helped him keep the time, but for Berg it was an indication of where he should look for his opponent's weaknesses." Huh? And here's how Edwardson and translator Per Carlsson have Winter's lover lament his post-coital silence: "One conversation for 10 couplings." Couplings? Really?

Indridason, meanwhile, shifts smoothly from the personal to the procedural. Everything's in balance, cliches are nonexistent, the plot and pacing are irresistible, the resolution just right.

Political posturing 

Oh, did I mention "Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End" is about the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme by a right-wing conspiracy? Lefty politics are part of the Nordic landscape, but here you'd think that contemporary Sweden was the second coming of the Third Reich. Larsson and Mankell can be guilty of political hyperventilating, too, but their journalists and detectives don't let things go off the deep end. Edwardson's politics are harder to pin down, and he nicely weaves in stories of anti-immigrant racism. "Hypothermia," meanwhile, is more psychological than sociological.

Bleak chic

There's a thin line between existential despair and bleak chic. Mankell himself crosses back and forth between the two, but neither Persson nor Edwardson earns his gloom. Persson: "Ever since they started their beat . . . his thoughts had focused exclusively on the that would provide at least temporary relief from his miserable existence." Edwardson has one of his detectives reflect: "We're treading along the very brink of human misery here." Indridason, on the other hand, lets icy conditions rather than purple prose set the tone.

Sweden has given crime-novel lovers much to be thankful for, lately. But if these three novels are any indication, it's time to move to Iceland.

Which Swedish thriller will give you the chills?

TITLE "Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime"

AUTHOR Leif GW Persson

THE STORY Can police superintendent Lars M. Johansson prove an apparent suicide was murder and figure out its relation to the assassination of Olof Palme?

THE VERDICT What's Swedish for "Oy"?

TITLE "The Shadow Woman"

AUTHOR Åke Edwardson

THE STORY Can chief inspector Eric Winter figure out why a woman was killed and her child kidnapped?

THE VERDICT What's Swedish for "Get to the point"?

TITLE "Hypothermia"

AUTHOR Arnaldur Indridason

THE STORY Can inspector Erlendur Sveinsson come in out of the cold long enough to solve an apparent suicide, a disappearance from long ago and the mystery of his daughter's misery?

THE VERDICT What's Icelandic for "We have ourselves a winner"?