Under the Snow

I love it when someone calls a book "moody." It's even better when I agree with them.
There are tensions in an isolated village near the Lapland border where everyone knows your name, wants your secrets, and suffers together through a winter that is "5,064 hours long" (p 4). Even Police Constable Torsson has an attitude when he learns he has to travel 25 miles over the ice and snow to investigate the death of a young teacher. When a man is found frozen to death in a snowbank and the entire community won't talk about the details, for all appearances it looks like an accident. This much is true - after getting into a fight after a mah-jongg game Matti Olsen collapsed and died of exposure. Case closed. Or is it? A friend of Matti's arrives show more the next summer and convinces Torsson it isn't really over; the case deserves a second look. Is it connected to a woman with a piece of bloody rope in a backpack?
For most of the story it bounces from perspective to perspective as different characters share what they want you to know. Most effectively, Ekman reserves the first person narrative for the murderer's detailed confession. show less

If you can't think of anything good to say, say nothing.

Three hours later....

That didn't last long, I have to say something. I gather this is a first novel, maybe it's also her worst. I felt like the characters were largely names with adjectives added to them. None of them felt real or fleshed out. It has the virtue of being short, but despite that I'm afraid I skimmed the last third, having lost patience with it by then. I would have made a bad Sámi.

If you can't think of anything good to say, say nothing.

Three hours later....

That didn't last long, I have to say something. I gather this is a first novel, maybe it's also her worst. I felt like the characters were largely names with adjectives added to them. None of them felt real or fleshed out. It has the virtue of being short, but despite that I'm afraid I skimmed the last third, having lost patience with it by then. I would have made a bad Sámi.

Not bad. Ekman is more in control of her materials than, say, Stieg Larsson was, but she's not quite where she would be with Blackwater, which so well balances a large number of plot elements to create a sense of northern Scandinavia as a world unto itself, but also make it significant to readers who know little of that world.

If you can't think of anything good to say, say nothing.

Three hours later....

That didn't last long, I have to say something. I gather this is a first novel, maybe it's also her worst. I felt like the characters were largely names with adjectives added to them. None of them felt real or fleshed out. It has the virtue of being short, but despite that I'm afraid I skimmed the last third, having lost patience with it by then. I would have made a bad Sámi.

This book felt more like a long short story than a novel and probably because of that I enjoyed it more than I did Blackwater. Small town Sweden and some excellent writing/translation.

A murder story set in a small town in the Swedish Lapland. Ekman's thrillers evoke the harsh landscape of the far north extremely well.