Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Deep in a Swedish forest Tuva Moodyson arrives to take up her new job as deputy editor of the local paper in a town that’s small enough to be run by three cops: the bumbling Chief, his deputy, and Noora, the constable and Tuva’s lover.
Above the town is a village on a hill top with no policeman but a cab driver who styles himself The Sheriff, and dresses the role down to the pressed uniform and the hat. Much of the action, the violent part, occurs in the village although the risk is ubiquitous as elk hunters prowl the forest, firing sporadically, even at night.
On the precipitous road connecting the two communities Tuva comes on a hysterical woman and a headless corpse: the scoop of a lifetime for a thirty-something reporter but Tuva goes further. After the shock and her initial – and initially helpful - statements to the bewildered deputy chief, after interviewing the widow of the victim now identified as the local plumber, Tuva sees herself as a white knight bent on avenging him for the sake of the widow and the good of the whole community.
Which is ironic because after denial, after insistence that this murder was the work of an outsider, the villagers realise that the perpetrator is one of themselves. Suspects abound, and they are weird, but a little less weird seen through the eyes of a sophisticated reporter, although the reader flinches with her in the pop-up shop where two sisters carve trolls from animal products, including human skin. Less unpleasant but equally suspect is the rather too amiable Bosnian grill owner who employs only Serbs and Croats, the clockmaker with a past that included four mysterious years in Estonia, the widow who owns the self-storage premises – operable at night -- and her lascivious son. Weaving in and out of the complexity is the enigmatic figure of the Sheriff: charlatan or holy fool or killer?
Everyone is suspect in this crazy Nordic noir as events build to Pan night: a once innocent celebration now rumoured to be an occasion best avoided by all except the villagers. Participants have to be masked and Tuva attends disguised, and so becomes the only credible witness when, at the height of the predictable orgy, the severed head of the murdered plumber is discovered, stuck on the point of an anvil in the public square.
In the ensuing debacle, Tuva turns hunter: trailing the police, wheedling classified information out of her lover, following scents and unearthing secrets, attracting attention. She is the reporter who uncovers too much.
This is a novel steeped in suspense: from the predatory elk hunters and the crazed kids playing obscene games, to curious adult perversions and worse: the torture that this reader skipped.
An unpleasant clever book that lives up to its rave reviews.
