Nordic Noir

Book Review: ‘The Ice Child’

May 21, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Ice Child by Camilla Läckberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. This is a gripping Nordic noir in Camilla Lackberg’s series that, in part, charts the arc of married couple Erica Falck and Patrik Hedstrom — she’s a true-crime writer, he’s a detective — on another grisly adventure. This one begins with a traumatized young girl wandering blindly in the snow observed by a horsewoman: we won’t truly understand the significance of this scene or the depths of its evil until the very last page.

Sweden’s Lackberg works on a big canvas — there are many, many interconnected characters in these books. That can be a curse or a blessing — like a Russian novel you have to keep track of who’s who. The best way I find to do that is to take my smartphone and charge it on the opposite side of the house and just let myself go.

Lackberg’s plotting is on a plane with, is it too much to say, Agatha Christie? At the very least her plots have that level of complication and awareness that even old apparently harmless ladies have a knowledge of the world that should never be underestimated. Besides its insane page-turner quality that kept me up on succeeding nights well after a reasonable bedtime, there are so many fascinating domestic themes. Erica and Patrik and their extended families are constantly trying to achieve a work-life balance with the help-hindrances of parents and in-laws. As a married couple, they are also trying to keep a balance of passion, compassion and mutual respect in a world awash in evil (and, yes, that is no exaggeration).

One theme that fascinates me in this particular novel is reflections over and over again on the subject of mothering: what makes a good mother, what limits maternal feeling, the extent a mother will go to protect a dangerous and even deranged child. In one very quiet scene toward the book’s climax, a daughter finally asks her mother the question that the teen must have asked herself a thousand times a day: mama, why don’t you love me? It is a raw question and cuts deeply. Sitting there, in my nightgown, racing toward the end and the many final revelations that keep spinning the story in surprising directions, I paused and wondered what is that question I have for my mother — and would I ever be brave enough to ask it.

And all this while corpses pile up and cold cases thaw. Lackberg is top-shelf Nordic Noir, and if you’ve done the Steig Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Anne Holt, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir circuit, Camilla Läckberg is a must-read.

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Book Review: Arnaldur Indriaoson’s very chilly, and chilling, ‘Reykjavik Nights’

May 29, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indriðason
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s an interesting moment when mystery authors of signature detectives (Ian Rankin and his Rebus, for example) have reached into the darkest, most damaged corners of their hero or heroine’s psyche and face the possibility of retiring them. And, then, there are those like Philip Kerr in his Bernie Gunther series, who hop back and forth in time, filling in the blanks of the fictional past and digging deeper into their detective to reveal missing bits. (Almost like an old married husband that suddenly tells his wife a story that she has never heard before, although she thought she heard them all. So, along comes, Arnaldur Indrioason going back to the early days of his introverted, deeply moral, haunted Icelandic Detective Erlendur. What was he like on the early days in his job with the police in Reykjavik? As the title indicates, he was on the night shift, stepping in on family disturbances (often the most dangerous for cops — stepping between physically violent spouses that suddenly unite against the police). The young Erlendur is a little stiff, a little untried but shows the stubborn dedication and deep empathy that will define the character and his career. When he encounters the corpse of a homeless alkie face down in a green anorak drowned in a puddle, the decision to call it accidental death nags at him. Between detangling car crashes and drunken brawls at night, and occasionally dating a woman with minimal passion on his side, he begins to investigate the death and a few random disappearances as well. Those who know the series (not that you need to have read a single one of Indrioason’s wonderful novels to read this one), know that he is haunted by a disappearance in his past for which he feels profoundly guilty. It is interesting to see Indriason handle the defining tragedy here, gently, in small bites, with a light touch, because the young, green detective will not have faced down this core demon until later in his career/life. “Reykjavik Nights,” like all the writer’s novels, is subtle and patient and compulsively readable. I remember staying in for an entire drizzly summer day in Nantucket glued to “Voices,” about the stabbing of a hotel Santa set in Reykjavik, a victim and a locale that could not have been more opposite from my surroundings. And, yet, I had that delicious, let me just read one more chapter feeling, that led to another and another. I find the author’s prose simple to the point of hypnotic, his detective low-key, and this return to the early Erlendur, inexperienced traffic cop obsessed with the why behind suspicious deaths he’s not even tasked to investigate. This dogged trait, implanted here in a satisfying prequel, will lead to the man’s true vocation: finding the lost and bringing justice, when possible to the guilty that cavalierly end the lives of others and then try to retreat to some semblance of normality, But, as we see through Erlendur’s eyes, and into his heart, even the most apparently normal, functional individual is driven by past events they can often barely articulate.

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Why Asa Larsson and Swedish Noir Gets To Me

June 10, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Asa Larsson’s Second Deadly Sin, a Rebecka Martinsson Mystery due in August from Quercus Books

I was up last night until three AM. Reading. Reading in that way you do when a book grabs hold of you and won’t let you go. I have another forty pages of Asa Larsson’s The Second Deadly Sin, about a series of remote murders past and present that appeared to begin with the discovery of a bone in a bear’s belly and an unrelated sexually-tinged murder of an easy grandmother. I have another forty pages because I finally put the book aside, saving the end like ice cream for later.

Last night, as my husband slept and my Russian Blue Valentino flopped at my feet, snorkling and snoring, I folded a page. It had nothing to do with murder. Two Swedish women sat across from each other at a table, one an investigating prosecutor in her thirties, Rebecka, on unofficial business and the other, Maja, a sixty-something silver-haired beauty apparently nursing her terminally ill mother. Surrounded by silence, Maja talks about being an old woman but feeling like a child inside.

I remember my own grandmother, Eva, in her eighties pulling the flesh on her arm and letting it slowly fall back. It lacked elasticity. She looked at me and said: I don’t feel old, but look at that.

And, so, in the middle of this investigation — bears, death by pitchfork, suicide — one relatively older woman appears to open up to a younger one, Both fictional women, we discover, share mommy-abandonment issues. And the older one, Maja, says to the younger one, Rebecka, the protagonist, that inside Maja is still a little girl that wants something from her dying mother before she goes.

Rebecka simply asks, “What?”

And, in the quiet, in that moment, I wonder what I would want my own mother to say, finally, to set me free. Or if, through writing, I have already largely set myself free and anything that she could say would be anticlimactic.Maja, with her thousands of silver braids, sexy at sixty, then says this:

“Oh, nothing much. ‘I’m sorry,’ perhaps. Or that she loves me and is proud of me. Or maybe: ‘I understand that it wasn’t so easy for you.’ You know. It’s so ironic. she left me and moved away when I was twelve years old because she had found a man who said: ‘No children.” God, but I pleaded and promised that I wouldn’t cause any trouble. But she…”

It is the middle of the night at my house, and these women are discussing the difference between what they want from their personal ties, family ties, and what they hope for. They sit around a table in a remote country house surrounded by a buffering snow. They slip and slide in an intimate discussion that moves to love, general and specific, past and present. They sit in silence, comfortably and the section ends with the narration: “Dead women, mothers, grandmothers — all of them sat down on the empty chairs around the table.”

And, then, after a section break within the chapter, writer Larsson drops in a little wedge of plot that is absolutely chilling. It’s as if she was lulling you to sleep with emotional depth, with the way we live in the tangles of our heads and hearts, at cross purposes, looking backwards, living forwards. Even our most intimate relations are strangers in some way — we do not know the voiceover that runs in their minds. My mother does not know me. How can I claim to really know my daughter as an individual separate from me?

This is where Larsson leaves me at three in the morning. And this is why I read good Scandinavian mystery fiction.While the whodunit and why forces us forward, the mystery of identity and the way that the past imprints the present deepen our understanding of the human condition.