Boy, you guys that don't read scandinavian are really missing out on a great author here! This was the first book I read on this guy, and I love all the books I've read since. The same goes for the movie and all the TV mini-series!

This is one of Jan Guillou's best. After reading this I wanted to learn so much more, and I wanted to start the book all over again...

Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton - aka Coq Rouge - and his colleage officers in the Swedish army is faced with a new enemy. One that doesn't play by the rules of a officer and a gentleman. But the Sicilian mob does also meet an enemy of kind they have never met before. A confrontation that only can result in one way - VENDETTA

Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton a.k.a: Coq Rouge has to infiltrate a German terroristorganisation. His communist past hunts him. His sympathy for the group grows. He has a job and a license to kill that he wont hesitate to use. The special agent that can do anything, anywhere. He is the ultimate spy...

A brilliant story about a hero who starts to question his own actions. In the eyes of the public he is a hero but Hamilton himself is seeing more of a murderer in himself. The story is about how Hamilton search a way to come to peace with his own conches.

If you like James Bond and in particular a swedish james bond with socialistic values then this is a book for you. Putting that joke aside, this is pretty intense action which resembles John Clancy at his best. I can highly recommend this book.

This is about a boy who is a troublemaker at school. When the book starts, he is just being beaten up by his dad, a crazy man who searches for reasons to hit his children. The dad is as happiest when he gets to beat the kids with the dog's lead with a clip on. When the clip hits the boys, it makes a tiny hole, enogh to stay for a week and create a scar.

As the boy is a troublemaker at school, the parents decide to send him to the private school of Sjernsberg, out on the countryside.

The boy stops being a troublemaker as he realizes that he can't continue being that. Being a toublemaker leads nowhere, he says. But when he gets to the new school, the cruelty he faces is beyond his worst nightmares. And it doesn't get better when he, a high school one grader, refuses to obey the mean high school fourth-graders.

A book about evil people and evil in general. It's a masterpiece. I read it in one day. A book that has opened the eyes of literature for thousands of young Europeans.

It's brilliant! A masterpiece. A book about the hellish childhood of a boy who gets beaten and whipped by his father every day after school and who compensates by becoming a school bully. After being relegated from school, he is sent to a boarding school where his life takes another downturn when he as a freshman refuses to obey the older students.

A book that makes you shudder from discomfort, yet ask for more.

This is one book in a series of ten about the swedish spy Carl Hamilton, working for the security police. The whole series is very popular in Sweden and some titles have been translated into several languages. The books follow Hamilton for ten years and at the same time the author reviews events that took place in Sweden and the world (86-96). In this book Carl has been ordered to eliminate a swedish man who escaped from prison and fled to Russia, he was in jail for spying for that same country (an event the really occured). The book shows Carls hard work of finding this man. At the same time Carl is charged for treason in his home country, how will he get out of this? The author, Jan Guillou, has written a very exiting book that is very close to reality, he always takes time in checking with a wide variety of sources. The book really grabs you and it's hard to put it down.

Guillou, the best journalist Sweden has ever seen, is also a magnificent writer. All ten book in the Coq Rouge series are brilliant, and "Enemy's Enemy" is one of the best. You will get more out of the story if you have read the previous books about the hero Hamilton, though.

Enemy's Enemy is one of Guillous finest in the 10 book "Coq Rouge" series, chronicling the career of Naval Commander Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton, Sweden's reluctant James Bond. The leading Scandinavian master of intrigue and suspense has created a character in the psychological mold of le Carre and with the flare of Flemming. Hamilton is a Swedish noble, recruited by the Swedish navy and trained by the CIA and Navy Seals, to become Sweden's one-man secret army. His mission: hunt down and liquidate a defected Swedish spy in Moscow, to avoid a destructive international secret service war. However, the very men who recruited him are painfully unaware of the extent his of capabilities, and embarrassingly unprepared for the consequences... A beautifully composed and thought provoking novel in a series and by an author unfortunately largely unknown outside of Scandinavia.

In this book Hamilton has to prevent and stop nuclearsmuggling from Russia to Sweden and finaly to Libya. This book is really good criminal thriller. It can keep you awake for many hours when you read it. Jan Guillou can really write so it makes shivers go down your spine, and this book wasn't any diffrent. This book has many political aspects. It views Sweden as an Country thats controlled by the USA. Cause they're against the Palestiniens and they get their orders from CIA.

For those of us that really appreciated the police work parts in Coq Rouge this book is a gem. There are brilliant under stories with characters that feels more than usual real. The language is a delight, and his charcterisation about the modern Scandinavia (not only Sweden) are so sharp that you want to read the books over and over again.
Sometimes Carl Hamilton may becomes a little but too much Carl Hamilton, but he stands as a guarantor that the novel will not end up as a vessel to write about family tragedies, personal problems and gastric ulcer: a Scandinavian disease in litterature.

This book is in my meaning a very good, and for that matter, well written book. It is the second part of a trilogy, and it is the most exiting, and interesting of the three. The story in short is that Arn Magnusson, or Arn de Gothia as he is called in the Holy Land, has been forced into the Order of the Knight Templars to repent sins committed in his youth.

He is ordered to devote 20 years of his life in the Holy Land to fight of attacks by Muslims, who tries to reclaim Palestine, and Jerusalem.

During the course of the last 10 years of his services we follow him, as he climb the ranks, until he is second in command of the order. We follow him through triumphs, sweet victories, and shameful defeats. The story is extremely well written, and one can easily see that the author have done a great job with the research part. You don't really want to let the book go. It is well worth the investment, and for all you non-Swedish speakers out there... well I have heard rumors that there will be an English version release sometime soon.

Jan Guillou continues his series about the swedish knight Arn in Tempelriddaren. This part of the trilogy takes place in the holy land during the crusades. Arn has after several years in Palestine become a skilled commander and knowledgeasble in the ways of the saracen enemy. During the book Arn meets several known figures like the arab commander Saladin, king Richard Lionheart and Walter Scotts fictional knight Ivanhoe, while he waits for the possibility of returning to Sweden and his beloved Cecilia. I found Tempelriddaren an excellent mixture of swashbuckling action and historical comment. It is more enjoyable and entertaining than it's predecessor "Vägen till Jerusalem", and definately qualifies as a real pageturner. The characters are sometimes borderlining on the stereotypical, with Arn being the invincible, good hero and the bad guys having few redeeming features at all. Still, the book is a crackling good read and whets the appetite for the final installment of the series.

It started as a page turner. "This is going to be great!" was my thoughts, ...for the first twenty pages...
Then something diffuse happend to the text. This wasn't the early Jan Guillou. I couldn't feel the nerve. I missed the convincing feeling. ...I felt, ...that this time he had written a story that was meant to be accepted by the female critics. Perhaps I even felt a touch of commercialism that I hadn't felt before. I missed the convincing feeling that allways had surrounded the secondary figures and Hamilton in his first years...

This book, the first in a trilogy, has it all. Excitement, grief, love and humour. This is Guillou at his best. I found the book a real pageturner. The story takes uss back to a time most of uss only heard about at school. We can follow the destiny of a young boy born in a time where most battle was about who would rule the kingdoms of the North. I can hardly wait to start reading the next book...