Sun Storm

Larsson, Asa.  Sun Storm.

This is the first in a Swedish series featuring Rebecka Martinsson.  I'll be looking for the others in the series as I found Rebecka an intriguing character.

When the brutally murdered body of charismatic Viktor Strandgard is discovered by his sister in a fundamentalist church in northern Sweden, Sanna Strandgard calls her old friend, Rebecka Martinsson, a tax attorney in Stockholm.  Although the friendship has, for good reasons, languished, Rebecka responds by returning to their provincial village to support Sanna and her children.

The novel has some interesting characters and becomes as much a psychological thriller as a police procedural.  While not everything held together for me, I found myself quite in engrossed in the characters and the atmosphere.  Northern Sweden is really, really cold!  I needed my comforter even in my nice warm house because the descriptions were so much colder than any idea of cold experienced here in the South.

The suspense builds as the narrative gives more information about the church itself and Rebecka's initial involvement.  As Rebecka grudgingly revisits and reviews the past in order to understand the present, the threat to her own life increases.

The conclusion leaves an ambivalent feeling in one narrative line which, while realistic, leaves the reader uneasy.

I hope the library has more by this author, otherwise I'll have to order them.

Fiction.  Mystery/ Police Procedural.  2003/translation 2006.  307 pages.