Not as well written as Larsson and Mankell’s works, and rather formulaic. Still, good reading for the beach, if not the...
A middling mystery by Swedish economist turned novelist Läckberg, a phenom in Europe but hitherto unpublished in the United States.
The Germans have a word for the literary genre that sells madly across the continent: Schwedenkrimi, “Swedish crime novels.” Never mind that pioneer Peter Høeg is Danish; the fact remains that a small squadron of Swedish writers, headed by the late Stieg Larsson and the still-living Henning Mankell, and including Mari Jungstedt, Anna Jansson and Johan Theorin, have made a specialty of blending gruesome murders with seamy side portraits of modern Swedish society, outwardly well scrubbed and orderly, inwardly an ugly mess of avarice, incest and racism. Läckberg’s Sweden is a touch less nasty than all that, but the setup is the same: The little village of Fjällbacka—a real place on the country’s west coast—is nice to look at, very dangerous to look into. Erica Falck, a coffee-addicted writer gone to the big city, where she’s struggling with a biography of novelist Selma Lagerlöf, has returned to her village to attend to her late parents’ estate and try to find some peace and quiet in which to work. It’s an inspiring place, after all; writes Läckberg, “Each new season brought its own spectacular scenery, and today it was bathed in bright sunshine that sent cascades of glittering light over the thick layer of ice on the sea.” But darkness soon descends when Erica’s childhood friend, the ethereally beautiful Alexandra Wijkner, turns up dead, the apparent victim of suicide, now lying frozen in a bathtub in an unheated house. Why she would have killed herself is a question that Erica takes up as she prepares a memorial for Alex, a project that turns into a book, then an inquest, now in the company of another childhood friend, a detective. The two turn up the unexpected—which, of course, every fan of Schwedenkrimi expects—namely, the sordidness of the wealthy, the appalling effects of child abuse and the general mayhem that ensues whenever cabin fever sets in.
Not as well written as Larsson and Mankell’s works, and rather formulaic. Still, good reading for the beach, if not the sauna.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-092-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
