The Second Child

The trial was over. The men sentenced to hang in the gray stone prison the following day shivered in their whitewashed cells.U.S. Army Lt. John Hurtree shook the rain from his hat and checked in with the Office of the Provost Marshal. He removed his long brown trench coat and laid it on the table. The Corporal frisked Hurtree’s wiry body. The box under his arm was next. The guard logged the contents into the journal, ‘Photographs’, beside Hurtree’s name and rank.

World War II has been over for more than a year. In Nuremberg, the day before he is to be executed, a Nazi war criminal calls U.S. Army Lt. John Hurtree to his prison cell and tries to negotiate with information about the identity of a child in a photograph. Hurtree refuses the bargain, but the question of the child plagues his life even after retirement.

Stockholm, Sweden, 1996. A police investigation into the mysterious death of a doctor and his nurse brings Hurtree to Sweden. Police Commissioner Sara Markham and Hurtree work together to solve the puzzle of the murders. At the same time, they uncover the astonishing secret identity of an elderly woman living in southern Stockholm, and race to save her life.

Jon Stenhugg is the pen name of a Swedish author, born in California, U.S.A., and who graduated from Stockholm University, Sweden, with a degree in Education, Psychology and Statistics.

He taught Education and Psychology to teacher trainees at Stockholm School of Education for thirteen years, with time out for a few years of administrative service at the Swedish National Board of Education and the University of Falun. After that he worked for a number of years in the private sector, as a sole proprietor of a firm in the computer industry. He began to write this novel in 2005 while living and working in Ireland.

'The characters were well developed and believable. The prose was excellent. The settings good. (…) The tension was well-paced and a couple of times had me flipping the page quicker to find out what happened.' See the full review here.

– Nordic Noir Book Reviews

'[A] well written and neatly plotted novel – part thriller, part alternate history. It concerns a murder taking place in Sweden in 1996 and the identity of a child in a picture from Germany during the Nazi period. The story takes our investigative team to archives in Germany and Sweden. Thriller fans will be pleased as the book is well paced and has some excellent suspense (…) the book's premise is original and fascinating and should appeal to fans of WW2 fiction and thrillers alike.' See the full review.

– Christoph Fischer, Historical Novel Society

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The Second Child

Jon Stenhugg

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