"Small towns sometimes have a voice of their own.
On a snowy winter night in 1999, Sander and Killian leave a house party together outside a small town in rural Sweden. The very best of friends, the two seventeen-year-olds imagine they will remain so forever. But by the next morning, a corpse is found in the trunk of a car, and each boy is a suspect in the murder. Each has something they want to conceal from the police. And from the other.
The hunt for the killer will take more than twenty years. It will see the lead detective leave the force forever. And it won’t end until a second body turns up in similar circumstances, and the tight-knit community’s secrets are finally brought to light."
What Worked for Me:
This was an expertly plotted mystery investigation. At the beginning, it seemed pretty straightforward and I found myself wondering why this would take 20 years to solve. I didn't anticipate all the different layers to the crime, characters, and investigation. I loved that we got to follow the detectives as well as the other characters who were also finding out information from the police and from each other. I think Carlsson does a really great job of drilling down to the human element in this read and I would be interested in reading more of his novels.
The setting of this rural town in Western Sweden was fantastic and as someone who has never been to any part of Sweden, Carlsson does a great job of describing it in a way that felt very understandable. There was a sort of feel of 'this could be any rural town' that really made it easy to connect to the story. Since we do have a 20 year time span, it was interesting to see the ways in which the town changed and the ways in which it didn't.
The pacing was a bit of a slow burn and it took a little longer to start putting pieces together than I was expecting. Now, this wasn't a problem and I ended up thinking everything paced out just right in the end. I think I just needed to re-calibrate my mind from the mystery/thrillers I had been reading back to a police procedural mystery. But I think the slower pacing really allows the reader to sink into the story and get a feel for all the characters.
This is the 3rd book in the Hallandssviten series, and I had not read the first two books. Based on the descriptions, they seem to follow different towns in the same area of Sweden and there are mostly different detectives. It does look like some of the detectives overlap in the books, so it would be interesting to read the series and find the connections. That being said, I don't feel like I lost out or was confused about anything because I started on book 3.
What Didn't Work for Me:
There were a lot of characters in this read and it took a little while for me to really get a grasp on who everyone was and how they all relate to each other. There was a list of characters and brief descriptions of their relationships in the beginning of the book, but I read it on an ereader so it wasn't super easy to keep flipping back and forth. I would say by the 25% mark, I had all the characters straight in my head and didn't have any issues for the rest of the read.
Overall, this was a great slow burn Nordic Noir read. It took me a little while to get a handle on all the different characters and their relation to one another, but once I did, I was very much invested.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Hogarth. Expected publication date is December 2, 2025
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