The time period that prompted the creation of many important and famous Swedish crime novels is called folkhemmet. Folkhemmet is a political term that Per Albin Hansson used in a parliamentary speech in 1928 to describe an idea of Sweden as an egalitarian country where everyone’s needs are met. But in the years following its implementation, this Swedish welfare state drew much criticism and anxiety about the future kept on rising. One of the forms people used to express their political views and criticisms was literature, especially crime novels. One of the most famous series of crime novels that showed the reality and shortcomings of the welfare state was Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s series Novel of a Crime, which consisted of ten books. They aimed to use their crime novels as a way to analyze and criticize the Swedish welfare state, but at the same time, they also nostalgically looked at the golden age of the welfare state and its original ideas, which could especially be seen in the character Rhea Nielsen who is thought to represent the ideal folkhemmet. Sjöwall och Wahlöö’s first novels in the series were not very political, especially the first novel, Roseanna, which depicted a misogynistic man anxious about his loss of power, but also showed a blind spot in the authors’ social critique, which were foreign women whose promiscuity revealed an essentialism that was in conflict with Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s predominant views of social determinism. Furthermore, with regard to the 1990s and the new millennium, it felt as if the utopian dream of the egalitarian welfare state had become a distant memory. Anxiety about the increasingly globalized world continued to increase and this was reflected in literature. One of the most famous crime novels written at that time was Stieg Larsson’s book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was the first book in his Millennium trilogy. Like Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Larsson criticized Sweden’s political, economic and social situation through his books, but also showed a nostalgic longing for better times. In the novel, the journalist Blomkvist strives not only to find out what happened to Harriet Vanger, but also to expose the powerful investor Wennerström, who became rich from theft and fraud, and by doing this, he tries to regain people’s trust in critical journalism. His partner Salander strives to punish the men in the Vanger family who have violently murdered women throughout Sweden, as well as all the men who have abused her. Since most authorities have betrayed her, she must take matters into her own hands and resolve the cases in an illegal way, and by doing so, she serves a public purpose, as all the information she has gathered is used to bring justice to women who have been abused by men as well as to help restore public trust in a traditional journalist, i.e. Blomkvist, who still strives to hold those in power accountable.