This novel has an unusual setting, on the island of Gotland which lies in the Baltic Sea off the east coast of Sweden. The time sequence, one which has become fairly common in modern crime novels, is to give a day by day account of the events as they take place and to use the days and dates as chapter headings. So the novel starts on Sunday November 11th and ends on Wednesday 26th with a few gaps as appropriate.
Early in the novel a body, that of Henry Dahlstrom, is found in the basement of his flat. He has been a professional photographer, but as an alcoholic had lost career and family. The day before his murder he had had a large win on the horses and his murder is immediately associated by the police with one of his drinking companions and his newly-acquired money.
The police team working on the murder is led by Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas, apparently familiar to readers from an earlier novel. Progress on solving the case is comparatively slow until it is moved on by the appearance of Johan Berg, a newspaper reporter, who also featured in the earlier novel Unseen.
A second murder, this time of a seriously socially disadvantaged fourteen year old schoolgirl, Fanny, and the possibility that the two murders could be connected, creates a more desperate situation. This is heightened by details of the domestic and emotional lives of some of the characters and especially by a ruthless examination of Fanny's lonely life with a self-regarding alcoholic mother and her sexual exploitation by a much older man. There does not seem to be much hope of a satisfactory outcome.
I agree with the review which sees it as a weakness at the end that the identity of the murderer is "pulled out of the hat" and the reader feels a little cheated that it is not really possible to spot the villain. A number of false trails lead nowhere. However, the book is a good read with an unusual and well-described setting. Perhaps a little more detailed action, particularly towards the end, would have increased the involvement of the reader.
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Rosemary Brown