This arrived not long ago, but unfortunately too late for me to read it and get a review into Shiny New Books issue 1. But being a lover of Nordic crime, I wanted to read it anyway, and now I have. This is the first novel by a couple who are celebrated screen writers, and I'd say you can see the influence of film pretty clearly here.
The novel begins in 1987. Three figures are on the beach of an island off the west coast of Sweden, waiting for the incoming spring tide which will cover the beach to a depth of 50 centimetres. They have dug a deep hole, deep enough to hold the body of a woman, leaving the head uncovered. The woman is put in, and the figures watch as the tide comes up, inexorably. The water finally covers her head and she drowns. What they don't know is that a terrified ten-year-old boy has watched the whole thing from his hiding place behind the rocks.
Fast forward to 2011. Olivia Ronning, whose policeman dad died a few years earlier, is in her last year at police college. Just before the summer break, the tutor hands out folders to the students, containing unsolved cold cases -- an optional summer project. Olivia is intrigued to find that one of them involved her own father, and took place on the very day she was born. The discovery of a drowned woman buried in sand on a beach on a western island. She gets increasingly obsessed with the need to solve the crime, and her search for witnesses and clues leads her into some increasingly bizarre worlds, from world-class businesses to exclusive escort/call girl agencies, to homeless people, to young boys forced into cage fighting, to disturbed teenagers beating people up and filming it on their phones, and more besides.
This really is a rollercoaster of a novel, and zaps about with breathtaking speed between the various, and numerous, characters and locations in a dizzying manner, which I couldn't help thinking owed a good deal to the Borjlinds' experience in writing for the movies. There are enough red herrings to feed a large room full of hungry Swedes, and a couple of twists at the end which I certainly didn't see coming.
The novel has apparently been a huge hit in Sweden, and is the first in a projected series featuring Olivia and Tom Stilton, the retired detective she manages to unearth from the most unlikely and unpromising milieu. Not one for the faint-hearted or squeamish (which is usually me) but despite a few quibbles I whizzed through it avidly. The English translation came to me from Hesperus, so many thanks to them.
