Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
An intelligent but
very dark Scandi gore-fest with an ever-rising body-count!
Set in in Greenland and jumping
from the mid-1990’s to almost the present day this compelling thriller features
a 1990’s quasi-legal medical experiment on US army personnel stationed in
Greenland as well as the children of one of them — the only one to apparently
survive a bloody shoot-out — all concerned being adversely affected, mentally by
the medication given them, to better equip special forces for deployment in sub-zero
temperatures.
It also highlights deep-seated environmental
and local social problems of a declining, and in places ravaged, economy and
the perils of life, or rather subsistence, on the Arctic Circle.
Rape, incest, multiple murder,
abduction and to top it off, highly dangerous, cannibalistic and deeply
mentally ill, extreme Christian fundamentalists, (is that tautology?). That
said, just about everyone is, or by the end of the novel, will be, affected and
mentally scarred by the events depicted in it. Throw in local governmental
corruption and illegal pharmaceutical experimentation on local people and you
get a really toxic mix.
The plot is frankly just too damned
labyrinthine to summarise and you will have to read it, right to the last page to
get the full flavour of a little known part of the world that lacks daylight
for a significant part of the year, is of immense strategic importance, not
just to the United States but other ‘superpowers’ who have, or want to, get
their fingers into the pie for mineral, territorial and other exploitation. All
this is compounded by the rule of Greenland by Denmark and a burgeoning
independence movement amongst the Inuit and native Greenlanders.
I am not sure I fully understood
the role of some of the characters particularly a young woman, recently
released from prison, who was convicted of multiple murder whilst a child, as
she veers between a ‘good-guy’ fixated on vengeance for past rapes and sexual assaults
perpetrated on her and a possible link with the drug experiments and trained
assassins.
The crime, all of it, is treated
almost casually, not simply as a device by the author but by the police,
perpetrators and residents, as well. Rape and incest are casually accepted as
being part and parcel of the life lived by isolated communities with rather
shallow gene pools.
You can thoroughly enjoy this
thriller but be prepared to be deeply disturbed by aspects of it. It could also
do with a character list and a glossary of how to pronounce the names. As an aside, you also get the sense of the
rationale (if anything about the man can bear that term) for Trump’s recent
offer to buy Greenland.
This is the second in a series
featuring Matthew Cave and Tuparnaaq Cold Skin is the first which I will
now be sourcing.
Charlotte
Barslund (Translator)
