Kerry Hood was in publishing for many years, working in publicity for several publishers over the time, working on fiction and non-fiction titles. Crime and thrillers have always been those she turns to first, however, and the ones she reads late at night or when she has a quiet moment.
Two eighteen-year-old best friends leave a party in the Swedish countryside late one night to walk to their homes. The following day a body is found in a wrecked car. The events of that night were truly seismic and neither boy will be the same afterwards. Nor will the small community. Two policewomen investigated the murder – and what came after – but there was no justice, and no conclusion.
Twenty years later, fresh evidence comes before a new police team, and the lid is lifted off the case…
This intriguing and unsettling novel about the meaning of family, home and friendship is written in four parts, but it takes until the very end of the fourth to bring all the strands of the story together. The first section, the introduction, if you like, is to the characters and the laying out of the first steps into the way lives changed, is written with a sense of inclusion. The reader is at first invited to be there with the boys, their friends and their actions. Until we are not. After that we are as much in the dark as the police, and in the hands of a master storyteller, who has hooked us in, and is slowly, slowly, pulling us into his net.
The translation of Carlsson’s book has won the Swedish prize for best translated crime novel, so we can safely assume that it is true to the original, and that the shapes and forms of the script are as he meant them to be. There is nothing clunky to trip us, just good prose, and an involving tale, with jolting surprises and clues inevitably missed.
Everyone in the book has a story, there are no heroes and each person, in their own way, is guilty at some level. Of the two original detectives, only one is still alive twenty years after their involvement, and she then left the police shortly after the killing. The new team bring her back into it, even if they are dubious about her effectiveness. They will find out if she is still too affected by memories to be of real help, and if the characters still living in the small town can continue to hide their secrets and be governed by what each suspected originally.
These secrets, half-truths and lies, must all be unravelled to fully understand the events of that night and afterwards … and there is a second killing, a disappearance, an explosion and a lethal landslip to explain. Nearing the end of the fourth section, it is still not certain that we shall have that conclusion. But the journey there is well worth the uncertainty.
Editor’s Note: Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles
