Again. And while Levande och Döda (The Living and the Dead) is set somewhere I didn't really know, but was terribly suspicious of, this also feels like coming home. Starting a few days before the end of the world - or as we knew it, the Millennium - Christoffer has managed to anchor his murders to a date we all remember. This works well.
The place is Skavböke. I knew the name. I 'knew' I didn't like the place, but had no idea where it was, so now I have looked it up. It's up 'that way', where those of us who like the sea don't go. But don't worry, the people in this crime novel don't seem to like it much either; they know the world looks down on it and them. Sander, the main character, can't wait to leave. It's among him and his friends, all of them aged 18, that things happen, just before Christmas 1999. One boy is murdered. Another dies. And Christoffer must agree with me, because he has a real go at finishing Skavböke off.
Two new policewomen are there when it starts. When the story arrives in 2022 we meet Vidar again. It seems to be his job to take over investigations. He doesn't know the Skavböke crowd quite as well as his former colleagues, which might be a good thing. So as in Blaze Me a Sun, we meet the characters both when young, and later when adult. Their parents have in many cases died, or are quite old. This suggests that the culprit[s] are to be found among the former teenagers. And as with other excellent crime plots, we go from suspecting one to the next, to most of the others and back again.
Christoffer really does know his people, and his places. He remembers what it was like to be a young man. What it felt like to want to leave, and never come back.
I needed for this book to end because I needed to know. If not for that, I could have gone on reading for weeks. And I apologise to Skavböke. I will have to visit one day. The chapel in particular is beautiful.
I want more like this. Never mind Stockholm. Halmstad is where it's at.
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