THE SEPARATED WOMAN is an engrossing and challenging read not for the fainthearted. From deep within the nature of the world we live in, Sjogren takes his mystery/thriller into a bare, penetrating exploration by way of a single, thought-defying sentence.

The writer (narrator) is a displaced wanderer mostly lost to himself. One night he finds himself in a café at the edge of an area his landlord has warned him against. There he meets a local detective who vilifies the world with a tortured mix of existential philosophy and the horrific events of the city he knows too well.

This discursive flow radicalizes both men, each differently.

So in an odd way, they meld and continue to meet.

The meaning of this unlikely connection is part of the mystery. For over two months the suspense mounts and continues till the final word is written.

For his part, the detective's chief nemesis is a murderer-rapist he's dubbed The Confessor. Following him through the secret stirrings of a dark underground, he uncovers a trail of women named only by their critical function in The Confessor's bestial pursuit.

Yet by design the story is an inner fusion of what's told and what's written, for the narrator's creative instincts are reinvigorated by what becomes through the detective a wealth of sensationally useful material. While at first made nervous by the detective, he comes to see him as his muse, filling the vortex of his opinions and habits of mind which so far have failed to deliver the success he craves.

But in his reckless desire to excel in his craft, he reveals a level of instability allowing us to see that his meeting with the detective was possibly no accident, and his next book, the one we, through him, are now reading, is in fact his confession.