17. Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin

Category: 50 Books

17. Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin

This book won the Swedish Academy of Crime award for Best First Mystery Novel. It deserved the award.

This book was a fantastic thriller/whodunit. The whodunit  takes place in the mid-1990s on an island called Öland in Sweden, while the crime itself happened in the early ’70s. So of course, any new “evidence” that turns up is sort of actually just rumors and speculation.

As with most Swedish crime fic (I’ve read so far) there’s a desolate mood to the book, but it still manages to be exciting and page-turning. The mystery deals with a missing/murdered/drowned? child and the mother 30 years later. I’ll not give any of the plot away because it has loads of twists and turns. The ending was fantastic!

I’ve noticed with this one and also with the Åsa Larsson books, there’s an element of the supernatural in the stories. What’s amazing is that this tiny bit of “wait, is that a ghost?” doesn’t actually help the solving of the mystery, and yet it doesn’t get in the way either. And? It’s really mostly glossed over, almost as if it’s a hint of the paranormal. It’s like, “of course there’s a ghost. it’s over there. now, can we get back to the mystery at hand?” It works really well, especially with the melancholy feel the books have.

Wonderful book it gets 0 Cansecos, that’s how good it was.

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