New Regency up for Three Seconds

From DHD – Following in the wake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another hugely popular Sweedish crime novel is heading for the big screen. New Regency has acquired Three Seconds, the bestselling Swedish thriller by Anders Roslund & Bonge Hellstrom (a writing team made up of a former journalist and former criminal); Shine will produce.

Three Seconds is the story of an ex-con who works undercover for the Stockholm police. Charged with breaking the Polish mob’s stranglehold on amphetamine dealing in Sweden prisons, the ex-con gets himself arrested so he can infiltrate the mob in a maximum security prison. Beyond the fact that his wife is unaware he’s working undercover, the operative’s challenge is to crack the ring and get out before he’s exposed.

Book Jacket:

Dark, suspenseful, and more riveting than any thriller at the local cineplex, Three Seconds is the latest novel from best-selling Swedish duo Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström-heirs apparent to Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell as the masters of Scandinavian crime.

Piet Hoffman, a top secret operative for the Swedish police, is about to embark on his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he’s become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden’s prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go deep cover, posing as a prisoner inside the country’s most notorious jail.

But when a botched drug deal involving Hoffman results in a murder, the investigation is assigned to the brilliant but haunted Detective Inspector Ewert Grens–a man who never gives up until he’s cracked the case. Grens’s determination to find the killer not only threatens to expose Hoffman’s true identity-it may reveal even bigger crimes involving the highest levels of power. And there are people who will do anything to stop him from discovering the truth.

Winner of the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ 2009 award for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, and a #1 best-seller there, Three Seconds captures a nefarious world of betrayal and violence, where a wise man trusts no one and even the most valuable agent can be “burned.”