Grand final Grand Finale

Top Dog #6

What is the price of being Mr. One? Teddy knows, more than well. Even though he’s made himself a fair amount of money on a number of illegal operations, he doesn’t sleep well at night. The pressure from those around him is bigger than ever. His closest man thinks they should go for heavier stuff. There’s also a rumor going around that someone wants him dead. Teddy turns to his brother Darko for protection, Darko who’s just come home from an unhappy time in Malmö’s underworld.

Meanwhile, Jossan has stepped up: bigger business, more dangerous games. She has opinions on Teddy’s unwillingness to go for the heavier goods. Teddy has to choose. Should he take the bloody path lined with drugs – one that could lead to big money but which is also potentially lethal – or should he try to rekindle things with Emelie and Lukas and build a future on the right side of the law?

Grand Finale is the sixth installment in Jens Lapidus’ lauded Top Dog series.

Reviews

“Jens Lapidus is a master at creating suspense, not in the very least by toying with the reader’s sympathies and antipathies. Suddenly I find myself hoping that Teddy, despite his criminal infringements and the people he hurts along the way, will make it through somehow and that he and Emelie will get each other in the end. Until I remind myself. And then cheer again. /…/ Just like in the previous installments, Grand Finale brings out the criminal spectrum in all classes of society in an effective way. /…/ Read and enjoy the way one of our most skilled crime authors ties the story together in a brilliant series which I am definitely going to miss.”

Skånska Dagbladet, Sweden
“Jens Lapidus’ Top Dog series has been influential in shaping both novels and TV shows about Stockholm’s underworld as it appears today. With this, he brings the series to the finish line, and it is truly a Grand Finale.”

Falu-Kuriren, Sweden
“As usual [with Lapidus’ work], the perspectives are inverted. /…/ The characters’ relationships take up a lot of space. I like that, and I like the clipped style that has become [Lapidus’] hallmark. The straightforward, yet simultaneously multi-layered; that the characters get to be well-rounded and not reduced to just criminals. /…/ Lapidus does his job, and I can feel it in my whole body. /…/ A solid story, like this whole series, (…) has the power to create an understanding of the circumstances yet never an acceptance of criminal actions.”

Borås Tidning, Sweden
“I wouldn’t skip a novel by Jens Lapidus – he writes too well, and suddenly I am sitting there, biting my nails when drug dealer Teddy arrives at the schoolyard to pick up his son. Lapidus is one of Sweden’s foremost suspense writers, it is just a fact. /…/ Jens Lapidus manages to depict a sadly desperate world of gangsters with sympathy for the individuals and their not all that successful life choices, and it is of course tremendously thrilling when it turns out someone is set out to kill Teddy.”

Dagens Nyheter, Sweden
“Jens Lapidus is skilled at constructing moral dilemmas, ones which most of us don’t ever have to take a stance on. He knows the art of depicting the criminal world and its particular conditions. But he also knows how to tell the stories of Swedish upper class, where different kinds of drugs are as natural as cocktails nowadays.”

Ölandsbladet, Sweden