Johanna Mo

Thomas was always a screw up, beginning in his teens. However, things turned around once he met Jennifer. He has a steady job. He has a young son, Hugo. And he is aching to show what a great father he is by watching Hugo while Jennifer is away on a weekend trip. They talk every day and can’t wait to see each other.

So, imagine Jennifer’s surprise when she arrives at the train station expecting Thomas to pick her up and there is no Thomas and Hugo. Thomas’s car is not at the house. When they don’t show up, Jennifer calls the police. Hanna Duncker and her partner, Erik Lindgren take the call.

The first priority is to find the car and hopefully Hugo and no resource is spared. However, it is not easy searching the island of Oland, described as a place where nights are pitch-black and villages sometimes consist of no more than a few houses. There are many places one could get lost or stay out of sight if that’s the intent.

As Duncker and Lindgren investigate Thomas and his comings and goings, his life doesn’t seem to be as wonderful as we were initially led to believe.

Mo puts an interesting spin on this book. The first chapter is called The Last Day and, I’m not giving anything away when I say that intuitively we know it’s Thomas’s last day, but we still have no idea what happened to Hugo. Mo flips back and forth between the last day and the present investigation going forward day by day.

In The Night Singer, Hannah has moved back to her childhood home in Oland and gets a job with the local constabulary. She begins her unauthorized investigation into the murder conviction of her father. He was tried and found guilty of a particularly violent crime when Hannah was a little girl although that was not his nature. She has doubts about his guilt and wonders whether the story may be deeper than the facts suggest. In The Shadow Lily Hannah continues her investigation but must balance it with that of the missing Thomas and Hugo.

Mo provides enough plausible murder suspects to keep mystery fans guessing while keeping Hugo’s fate unknown until readers just ‘need to know’.

Of course, with any good Swedish noir, the locale is a main character and that is true of Oland. Additionally, a reviewer described Hannah as “a no-nonsense, dogged, and thoughtful investigator.” And a final reviewer said “Fans of realistic, detail-oriented police procedurals will best appreciate this one.” I concur and I look forward to continuing with this series as new books are published.… (more)

Maybe 2.5. I'm always up for a promising Scandi noir, and if it has a reasonably intelligent female lead and it's not about a serial killer, all the better.

Mo has set up an interesting premise: discontented detective Hanna Duncker escapes from Stockholm to return to the island where she grew up. Trouble is, her self-destructive alcoholic father (now dead) was a famous local case, found guilty of a nasty murder. No one has forgotten, and few (including her hostile brother) understand why she'd want to come back. So Hanna is the target of suspicion, animosity, and curiosity as she is immediately plunged into investigating the death of a teenaged boy - who is the son of her girlhood best friend, from whom she has been more or less estranged for years. This spreads uneasy tendrils into old relationships, old misunderstandings, and old troubles, as well as forcing Hanna to cope with the challenges of forming new friendships and partnerships on and off the job. She's not very good at that. Nor - in spite of what we are told - is she a particularly brilliant cop. Her detecting is pretty prosaic, insights are few. And - yeah, I know, it's Scandinavian - she BROODS. She's depressive, self-absorbed, and hard for her colleagues to connect to - and, unfortunately, for readers too. So the pacing is sluggish, repetitive, and everything takes too long. At least three characters repeatedly find that they "don't have the energy" to talk to a spouse, answer the phone, go to dinner. The grieving mother of the victim weeps and climbs into bed and pulls the covers over her head. For pages. Over and over. And this debut novelist does not seem to have learned about eliminating stuff that neither moves the story nor evinces character: Hanna walks through the door, puts down her keys (with a sidetrip into how her mother didn't like anyone to put keys on a table), goes through the living room into the kitchen, opens the cupboard, takes down the instant coffee, puts the kettle on the stove... Okaaaay, enough already!

The chapters head-hop: Hanna, her colleague Erik, grieving mom Rebecka, Rebecka's son Joel... and then a kind of clumsy twist of an ending. And all the while, Hanna's dad's murder conviction is lurking in the shadows, because, well, maybe that wasn't quite what it seemed as well. Stay tuned for #2. I'm in no hurry, though.

I will give Mo credit for getting her birds right. Yes, nightingales will sing at night. Yes, there is a bird called a black-winged stilt (we have black-NECKED stilts in is US; same family), and yes, it would be an uncommon bird worth chasing for a Swedish birdwatcher. And she gets the lapwing right too. So, chops for ornithological details. Some of us care about these things...… (more)