Elias Palm Sweden
Swedish author, born 1976, works in Lund in Sweden as a coroner. Palm’s job is to make medical decisions for the police and prosecutors and through his work he was inspired to write Corpus delicti, a crime novel about the everyday reality of a coroner.
New novel:
Causa mortis Ordfront, Autumn 2011
Coroner Ella Andersson is working a shift, when she is called out to a crime scene by the police. An old woman has been stabbed to death in her home. From a forensic point of view the investigation seems simple enough, but once Ella has finished the autopsy, she realises she may need to rethink her conclusions. There may be another reason for the old woman’s death.
Through a consultancy job for an international organsation Ella is drawn into a complicated web with threads going back to the concentration camps of the Second World War. Her conclusions seem to carry enormous weight with several unknown parties - all of whom are ready to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve their goals. Ella is forced to see that her days as an anonymous coroner are over and that she no longer is the one who observes. She has somehow become the one who is being observed.
Rights sold:
Denmark: People's Press
Corpus delicti
(Corpus Delicti)
Ordfront, Autumn 2010
When the coroner Ella Andersson meets new people she always notices their injuries and diseases rather than their personality. Hidden bruises and scars tell her whom she dealing with.
Outside of town a body is found. It has been lying in the ground for so long that tree roots have started growing through the scull. When the body is brought in to the section where Ella works there turns out to be a strange connection to Ella’s family, the upper-class family that she has tried so hard to distance herself from. Not only has she changed her sirname and remained unmarried, but she has also chosen a profession that is completely unsuitable for a good girl with a respectable background.
While pondering the case, Ella stumbles accross a website that is auctioning an antique clock, identical to the one that she remembers from her childhood home – her home which burnt down to the ground when she was six. The fire killed her father. Even though all of the family possissions should have been lost, Ella finds, more than 30 years later, an object that seems to have escaped the flames.
With a 40 year crisis in reach, a love affair that’s gone wrong and murder mysteries that claim her attention, Ella stands more alone than ever. Then she discovers that she is being followed.
Elias Palm’s debut is a clever and enigmatic crime novel which describes death from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Corpus delicti is the first novel in the series about the coroner Ella Andersson.
Rights sold:
Norway: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag
Denmark: People's Press
The Netherlands: Querido
Germany: Goldmann Verlag