THREE SECONDS Speeding Up
On Monday, USA Today gave Three Seconds, the new Scandinavian thriller by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, a stellar review (it would be more apt to call it a fan letter than a review). In today’s NYT, Janet Maslin, clearly not a devotee of the genre, says authors like Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell,
…know how to deliver the kind of stilted, world-weary verbosity that somehow quickens the pulses of this genreās readers. Even better, they are on a first-name basis with the Seven Dwarfs of Scandinavian Noir: Guilty, Moody, Broody, Mopey, Kinky, Dreary and Anything-but-Bashful.
Neither is she won over by Three Seconds. After a long description of the book’s plot, she calls it one of many “half-decent Millennium knockoffs” we can expect to see in the future.
Clearly, readers don’t agree. For most of the week, the book is has been at #2 on the B&N.com’s sales rankings, where it is featured as one of the “Best Books of the Month.” It has also cracked the Amazon top fifty, rising to #39 earlier this week.
It’s notable that Three Seconds is the very first book from the new imprint, Silver Oak, a joint deal between six-year-old British Quercus Publishing (publishers of Stieg Larsson’s books in the UK) and Sterling Publishing in the U.S.
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