Carin Gerhardsen Books in Order

Carin Gerhardsen was born on December 6, 1962, in Katrineholm, a small Swedish town where she also grew up. Long before she wrote crime novels, she was drawn to words in everyday ways, writing rhymes, speeches, and songs for family occasions.

She went on to study mathematics at Uppsala University. It was a practical path, and it led to a career as an IT consultant, including time working outside Sweden.

Writing was there from the beginning, though.

Gerhardsen made her literary debut in 1992 with På flykt från tiden, a philosophical novel. It found a publisher, but it did not turn her into a full-time author. For years, she stayed in the IT world while writing remained something she wanted to return to.

That return came in the late 2000s. After roughly fifteen years away from publishing, she shifted her focus to crime fiction, encouraged by her husband to give writing another serious try. In 2008, she published Pepparkakshuset, later translated as The Gingerbread House, and introduced the police team that would shape the next phase of her career.

The Hammarby books follow Detective Inspector Conny Sjöberg and his colleagues as they investigate violent cases in and around southern Stockholm. The Gingerbread House starts with a dead stranger in a woman’s kitchen. Cinderella Girl pairs a murder aboard a ferry with the disappearance of a small child. In The Last Lullaby, the team faces the killing of a family and a mystery around an apartment that seems far beyond the victims’ means.

Her cases often begin with an unsettling domestic detail, then widen into stories about secrets, family pressure, childhood harm, guilt, and the things people choose not to report. The police work matters, but so do the investigators’ private lives and the way a case can shake a whole neighborhood.

The Hammarby sequence eventually reached eight Swedish novels, ending with Falleri, fallera, falleralla in 2015. The books have been translated widely, bringing Gerhardsen’s Stockholm-based police stories to readers well beyond Sweden.

She has also moved beyond the series. Black Ice is a standalone thriller set on Gotland, where an icy road, a deadly accident, and several buried secrets collide over several years. In 2019, she also began writing for younger readers, co-authoring Projekt Gemini, Ett annat jag with Petter Lidbeck.

Gerhardsen lives in Stockholm. Her background in mathematics suits the careful construction of her mysteries, but the books stay focused on people, their choices, and the trouble that follows when old wrongs refuse to stay buried.