Larsson depicts her characters with mordant wit and describes their village with richly atmospheric details. A flurry of...
Snowdrifts and deep secrets bury a small village in Sweden.
This debut thriller won Sweden’s Best First Crime Novel award for 2003. In what appears to be the start of a series, the author, a former tax lawyer from Stockholm born in the Lapland village of Kiruna, sends Stockholm tax lawyer Rebecka Martinsson to Kiruna to find out what led to the grisly murder of Viktor Standgård, one of four pastors at the Source of All Our Strength Church. In a possibly ritualistic murder at the site of the church altar, Standgård had been virtually slaughtered, his hands cut off, his body slit open, his eyes extracted from their sockets. A young mother, Rebecka’s deeply neurotic friend Sanna, becomes a major suspect and is subsequently arrested for the crime when the blood-stained knife used to carve up the victim turns up in her home. Attempting to clear Sanna, Rebecka sniffs out an illegal tax scheme. The aurora borealis flares and villagers eye each other with enmity as clues, motives and more suspects emerge. Was the late pastor the victim of a spurned male lover? Had the pastor and perhaps even Sanna molested her two young daughters? And who is the psychopath who kidnaps and murders Sanna’s dog? More than familial ties bind Rebecka to the village and the case: Years ago, she had an affair with one of the church’s married pastors, who left her pregnant. In a violent finale, the villains, rather apparent all along, threaten her life and those of Sanna’s daughters.
Larsson depicts her characters with mordant wit and describes their village with richly atmospheric details. A flurry of clues, however, fails to conceal familiar, uncomplicated and predictable plotting.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-33981-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Fans of literate mysteries will appreciate the complex but realistic story, the satisfying resolution and the descriptive...
The "See-No-Evil" serial killer is jailed awaiting trial, and the last thing Sheriff's Detective Tony Mendez needs is another murder victim, especially a beautiful young woman brutally stabbed and slashed.
Marissa Fordham, a rising young artist and the protégé of the wealthy Milo Bordain, is discovered murdered in her isolated cottage. Haley, her 4-year-old daughter, rests badly injured on her mother's bloody corpse. Mendez catches the case, ably assisted by Vince Leone, a retired FBI profiler who helped solve the "See-No-Evil" mystery. Leone has retired and married a local teacher, Anne Navarre, who was almost murdered by the jailed serial killer. Anne is now studying child psychology and working as a court-appointed special advocate in juvenile cases, and she persuades a reluctant Vince to let her care for Haley. That necessary and time-consuming task deflects her from counseling an apparently psychopathic middle-school student who has stabbed a classmate. Mendez and Leone have more than one suspect in Marissa's brutal murder, even though the victim isn't all—or is more than—she seems to be. Hoag (Deeper Than the Dead, 2009, etc.) again stages her mystery in Oak Knoll, a fictional town somewhere near the beautiful landscape surrounding Santa Barbara and Lompoc, Calif., and her gift for description makes the area come alive. The author also discovers a suitable set of suspects ranging from Bordain's Mercedes-dealer son, a mathematical genius and college professor with Asperger's Syndrome and mother issues, and a prosperous and adulterous attorney who may or may not have been linked to the "See-No-Evil" serial killer. The good guys are less dramatic, although Hoag's character sketches are memorable, right down to minor players like the county sheriff, Cal Dixon.
Fans of literate mysteries will appreciate the complex but realistic story, the satisfying resolution and the descriptive writing.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95192-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
Moody but restrained, this is a familiar tale that sets out to upend itself—and succeeds.
A missing—presumed dead—woman’s husband and teenage daughter struggle with her absence and the question of whether she is truly gone in this third novel by Brown (This Is Where We Live, 2010, etc.).
Nearly a year after her mother, Billie, disappeared while hiking a wilderness trail in Northern California, Olive, a high school junior, starts having vivid visions. In them, Billie appears in a variety of settings, speaking short, inconclusive sentences that Olive believes mean she wants to be found. But if her mother is alive, why did she disappear? That happens to be the same question Olive’s father, Jonathan, has begun asking himself after learning that Billie lied about several weekend trips she'd taken in the months before she vanished. As he digs deeper, Jonathan uncovers too many secrets to ignore, shaking his understanding of his wife and marriage but otherwise pointing in no particular direction. While he worries that Billie was unfaithful, Olive worries that she’s in danger. Both concerns feel justified; neither feels like the whole story. All the themes here are well-trod. There’s the family coping with loss and its attendant questions. There’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's revealed to be darker and possibly more dangerous than believed. There’s the supernatural quality of Olive’s visions (is there a medical explanation, and does it matter?). There’s the natural shifting that happens in a family when children turn into teenagers, and there’s the ode on perfect Berkeley motherhood. It's because the author deftly incorporates all these themes into one building mystery, however, that the book is so page-turning. Readers are likely to be unsure of which outcome would be most satisfying until the very end.
Moody but restrained, this is a familiar tale that sets out to upend itself—and succeeds.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8946-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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