The Lost Ones [Moonwind Mysteries]
by Johan Rundberg; trans. from Swedish by Eva Apelqvist
Middle School    Amazon Crossing Kids    222 pp.
1/25    9781662525940    $17.99
Paper ed.  9781662525957    $9.99

Rundberg’s pair of 1880s detectives—twelve-year-old orphan Mika from Stockholm’s Public Children’s Home and police detective Valdemar Hoff—investigate the disappearance of a wealthy family’s teenage daughter, Beatrice. “Children disappear all the time,” says Mika, hearing of the case; Valdemar’s answer, “I hardly need to tell you that some lives are valued more than others,” voices a theme inherent in the series’ earlier books, but that here takes on deeper, darker meaning. The pair realizes that Beatrice is pregnant and hiding from her parents, who want to dispose of the unwanted baby by sending Beatrice to the “Dark Angel” when it’s time to give birth. Rundberg brings the Moonwind Mysteries full circle: the Dark Angel, having haunted the series from its first pages, emerges from the shadows as a person for whom “the unthinkable [has] become a habit.” In a “brilliant…not to mention insanely dangerous” plan, Mika and Valdemar close in on the villain. This entry—like the previous installments (beginning with The Night Raven, rev. 9/23)—is exceptional: for its dry, witty humor and compelling plot; its characterizations, at once engaging and deeply respectful (Mika is indomitable: perceptive, adamant, compassionate, and vulnerable); and especially for the gravitas at the heart of its crime solving, an awareness of a deep inequity that resonates well beyond the stories’ historical and geographical setting. Swedish noir for the young.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.