Fiction. Translated from the Swedish by Laura A. Wideburg. Justine lives alone in a house by a lake, where she has lived all her life. It is the house in which her mother died when she was small, the house to which her father brought the narcissistic and cruel Flora to be her stepmother. In this gripping psychological novel, stories of those who had victimized her converge until at last Justine starts to realize her power, and take revenge. Inger Frimansson was born in 1944 in Stockholm and grew up in various places in the middle of Sweden. Today she lives in Sodertalje, a town not far from Stockholm, with her husband Jan. She is considered by many to be Sweden's premier author of psychological thrillers. Critics place her novels in the same class as the best English and American novels in the genre.