Sample of literary figures
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Alex Recht
Male
In the Stockholm C.I.D., Detective Chief Inspector Alex Recht is something of a legend. With more than 30 years’ service and a large number of hard-to-solve cases behind him, he starts – even though he loves his job – to look forward to retirement and to being able to spend more time with his wife, Lena, with whom he has been married almost as long as he has been a police officer. In the books by Kristina Ohlsson he usually works together with Fredrika Bergman.
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Judy Hammer
Female
Superintendent Judy Hammer is head of a police department in North Carolina, Virginia, where she has to deal with both city crime and stubborn islanders in a short suite of novels by Patricia Cornwell. Hammer is a middle-aged, unhappily married but very fond of her young colleague Andy Brazil, who becomes her right hand. In the books about them, realistic police work is combined with some less realistic elements.
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Gunnar Mellberg
Male
A detective inspector, later chief inspector, in Lund, Sweden. He is tall, well-built, smokes a pipe and is interested in gardening. With his wife, he has four children. K. Arne Blom has written five novels (and a book for people with reading impediments) about Gunnar Mellberg. In the first novels, he has a minor yet important role, in the final one it is revealed that he is the son of one of Blom’s main characters, the security agent Loman.
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Annika Bengtzon
Female
Annika Bengtzon is the creation of the Swedish author and journalist Liza Marklund and possibly Sweden’s best-known journalist. She is married with two children, but she is also a highly competent crime reporter with a bad conscience on account of neglecting her family. Bengtzon is a complex woman who can be hard and tough one minute and reduced to tears the next. Nevertheless, she is portrayed as a highly capable modern professional woman.