3.5 stars. THE DOLL, the fifth in the formerly named “Children’s House” series which is apparently now called the “Freyja and Huldar” series, is probably one of the stronger entries in the series, although overall it remains just another generic police procedural murder thriller so I can’t recommend it too highly. I recently read the latest in Joe Ide’s IQ series and had similar feelings: I became invested in both series early on when I began reading regularly again and I fear that I was too impressionable—I valued each series highly at the time but now I feel like they might’ve been uninspired from the beginning. Or maybe it’s just STAR WARS syndrome: they’ve both been pushed further than the “story” required and that has made me question my prior enthusiasm. In any case, like I said, THE DOLL has its points of interest but ultimately can’t overcome its lack of ambition.

This time there are several different crimes involved which will prove to all be connected by book’s end: alleged sexual abuse by the man who runs a home for foster children; the discovery of two dismembered bodies in the ocean just off the coast; and the deaths of a teenager’s mother and father years apart, which she attributes to a creepy doll covered in barnacles which had been fished out of the ocean in approximately the same place the dismembered bodies were found. The way these all come together is pretty satisfying, although definitely not something that could be worked out in advance as it involves a whole host of contingencies, players, and additional facts and motives not apparent until they are revealed in the traditional last-minute confession. That’s fine, though. I don’t necessarily think of that as a mark against it: the complicated interplay of different people’s actions, including a surprise traumatic event introduced toward the end, is interesting and has an emotional draw.

All of the characters are as enjoyable to spend time with as ever, although I still kind of hate that the protagonists include a bunch of cops. There was one particular scene here in which Huldar declines to arrest some kids who are trying to buy drugs. He says that doing so would just marginalize them and risk turning them into criminals. Huh… now why would the “justice” system turn people *into* criminals?