Annika Bengtzon is a young woman working as a Summer intern at a Stockholm based tabloid called Kväspressen (=Evening Press).  One night she gets a tip through what was in my translation called "Cold Shivers", a phone line where everyone can tip the newspaper.  The majority of these calls are either pranks or drunken talk, but she immediately senses that this one is genuine: there really is a naked corpse of a young girl in Kronoberg Park.  She goes there with a photographer, and through a combination of good writing, decent investigating and some luck she gets her newspaper some scoops.  She earns her superiors' respect and her colleagues' envy.

The case seems very clear at first: the boyfriend did it.  The slightly clumsy way the government and a minister handle the minister's presence near Kronoberg Park around the time of the murder however brings that minister more and more in the picture, and before we know it an old partly covered up espionnage scandal is mixed in, and the true story is not that clear anymore.  Around the same time the radio show Studio Sex (sex also means six in Swedish) starts attacking Annika directly, making her story and herself incredible, and she cannot keep her job.

She leaves for Turkey for a while, and wants to abandon journalism - but that's a microbe one doesn't get rid of that easily.  She continues her investigation as she senses something in the minister's statements is fishy.  Her rather clingy boyfriend wants her to come back home and marry her, but in stead she dives even deeper into her inquiries, and goes undercover.
And I leave it to you to find out what she discovers :-)

A lot in this novel was very recognizable for me.  I've read Katrineholms Kuriren where Annika Bengtzon worked previously, and I've skimmed The Competitor (Aftonbladet, or Eveningpaper).  I walked around in the area where she, her mother and her grandmother live, there were so many villages that were familiar.  I shopped at Konsum, drank Ramlösa.  I even knew part of the route the minister followed when driving home.  I guess this made the novel pretty personal to me, even if what happened in it was as far as any other novel from my day to day life.  It sure helped imagining myself in this novel.

The book is a story about an investigating journalist, but that is only the main thread of the novel.  There is the hesitating novice that searches for the balance between respect for everyone's privacy and the reader's right to information.  There is the girl from a somewhat protected environment that is confronted with people that take far-stretching decisions about their lives she wouldn't ever take, but finds that her view on it is too black and white to deal with the people taking those decisions.  There is the journalist's own private life that colors her emotions throughout the book, even we know only near the end why her emotions were what they were all the time.  All these threads weave a very interesting story, far richer than "just" the investigating journalist's story.