The opening pages of Tove Alsterdal’s We Know You Remember (Faber &?Faber, £14.99; Tablet price 13.49) are compellingly atmospheric: forests, lakes, exhausting, undying summer light. An enormous Swede, driving at midsummer through Ådalen valley in northern Sweden, feels compelled to turn off the road and revisit his past. In a remote hamlet, he finds the locked house. Finds the key. Lets himself in. Upstairs, the bathroom is flooded. An old man is sitting in the shower cubicle, dead. We later discover that he has been killed. The visitor is his son, Olaf Hagström who, aged 14, was found guilty of the abduction, rape and murder of 16-year-old Lina Stavred. Naturally, he is suspected of having killed his father, but when a local girl, now Detective Eira Sjödin, starts to investigate, she realises that appearances and reality are very different things. The plot is of ingenious complexity; but the chief pleasures of this robust thriller are its evocation of landscape, and of character. Eira is attractively unable to keep work and private life separate, and it is the emotionally intelligent messiness of her personal situation which leads to the solution – or the almost-solution – to the 20-year-old mystery. Bad sex, too much alcohol, dementia, midges, dark melancholy verging on despair … What’s not to like in this deserved “best Nordic crime novel” of 2021?
20 April 2022, The Tablet
Playing with Granny
The best of spring crime
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