Sweden prolongs its idyll with the black genre thanks to authors such as Camilla Lackberg, asa larsson or own Viveca Sten. A female triumvirate of international scope. The first is already one of the greatest noir writers and one of the most anticipated for each of her new novels. Larsson also makes his sagas continuous hits.
Meanwhile Viveca Sten They are not lagging either, and since he devoted himself to writing full-time, back in 2011, once his saga capitalized on the lawyer Nora Linde reached that level of repercussion that demands and allows the delivery to the trade.
In diversity is the taste, without a doubt. But in the case of these three great Swedish storytellersThere are common aspects, a harmony that goes from the natural setting in those ample spaces, of exuberant nature on the most remote places or even around the big cities. Stockholm, Fjällbacka or Kiruna, it is always a question of the power of the telluric of those struggles in which the sun shines less hours, allowing the shadows to spread as a metaphor for the dark.
Thanks to these authors, the northern Europe that Sweden covers comes to us with that aura of mystery around crime. And it works, it does work ...
Top 3 recommended books by Viveca Sten
The secret of the island
The particular tandem between Thomas Andreasson and Nora Linde, which if you have already read something about Viveca, you will know well enough, has that charm of a different, strange cocktail, but with tasty and very enjoyable grounds.
On this occasion, Nora agrees to provide her particular services in an investigation parallel to the one reproduced for the possible suicide of Marcus Nielsen. Thank God, Thomas Andreasson allows himself to be carried away by his instinct to interpret the slightest doubts as those necessary clues to reveal those aspects of the crime that, presented by this author, lead us towards a mystery novel aspect.
Thus we enter a thriller in which Nora Linde, investigating according to the guidelines that her "partner" Thomas will indicate, gets too close to that focus of doubt, with the most inappropriate questions that end up arousing the suspicion of who it may be. the one responsible for Marcus's death.
And it may all have to do with a project that was abandoned many years ago, with an old recruitment center in which death also ended up manifesting itself in the most atrocious and unjust way.
Not guilty
A two-stage thriller that awakens that magnetism on the telluric, on those typical places where sinister mysteries lurk like a condemnation for its locals, an approach that at times recalls another novel by the young Swedish author, Cecilia Ekbac, The dark light of the midnight sun.
A certain esoteric aspect, favored as on so many other occasions by the lonely and dark landscapes of the Nordic winter, in this new case transform a small island in the Stromma archipelago into a space of evil. Only that the abstraction of evil is sensed, from the beginning of the reading, as something very human, with the worst shadows that turn the inhabitants of the island into potential unscrupulous murderers.
The popular imagination always tries to bury the worst of its memory under myths or legends. But the worst beasts are always humans turned into servants of the ominous and aided by the powerful tool of reason.
In the autumnal preamble that always anticipates the snows of these latitudes, a young woman disappears. The police of Nacka, the city that governs all those islands in southern Sweden, undertakes the search for the woman without fortune, until the rigor of winter makes it impossible to prospect the land and unfolds a frigid curtain of oblivion among the inhabitants of the small Sandham Island, in the same way that it already happened so many years ago ...
Nora Linde arrives on the island in the middle of the following winter. He knows nothing of what happened. She just wants to leave her previous life and her unfaithful husband, not knowing that unpleasant surprises await her there.
No one like some newcomers, Nora's children, to discover old secrets. Amid the snow and ice, in spaces that only intrepid children end up arriving as little conquerors, an old and macabre story is revealed, now turned into a pitiful myth, that of the family of children Thorwald and Kristine, who were lost to early XNUMXth century. And then present and future come together to offer answers about so many lives lost in yesterday and today ...
Closed circles
Again in the theme of this author we resort to the idea of the autochthonous of this northern peninsula to justify, through the particular and light light of the north; of the idiosyncrasy of the inhabitants of the north; or the wide landscapes and overwhelming spaces, that unique setting capacity that each new voice manages to awaken that conjunction between environmental darkness and the secrecy of a lifestyle more prone to introspection than that of other more southern areas of the old continent.
In this novel we guess that intention of complete mimicry between the disturbing black plot that freezes the blood and the long periods of submission to cold and isolation, all of this as a latent prelude to the sinister, of the cases that remain pending the thaw to transform any spring in a strange play of light and shadow, in the awakening of the inhabitants of the place from a hibernation of necessary unconsciousness to the harsh reality.
In this new case, published back in 2009 in Sweden, we meet again with the lawyer Nora Linde, showing off her magnetism for the dark. Or maybe it's that I'm really looking for it ...
The point is that the death of a colleague named Oscar Juliandre, during a maritime sports event, leads us from the Stromma archipelago to the south, to the island of Gotland (Between islands and cold northern seas are the affairs of this author) . On the island of Gotland we find a particular universe of colorful characters capable of anything to preserve their status and their appearances.
And that's where the inspector Thomas Andreasson and Nora will have to display all their deductive capacity, punctuated by a dark claustrophobic feeling that everyone on the island is in cahoots so that the truth is never known.
