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A review by ridgewaygirl
Until Thy Wrath be Past by Åsa Larsson
4.0
This is a crime novel set in the far north of Sweden, where Finnish is the second language and there's still plenty of snow on the ground in late April. Rebecca Martinsson has come to live in the house her Grandmother owned and to work as a police prosecutor. She loves the wild, remote area, where many places can't be reached by car and doesn't regret her move from Stockholm.
The story begins with a hair-raising account from the point of view of a murdered girl. She and her boyfriend were out scuba diving on a remote lake when things go terribly wrong. She's a presence in the rest of the book, pulling our attention toward different characters. Since the reader knows who the victims were before the police do, and the perpetrators are identified fairly early on, the suspense rests on the motivations for the crime. The book looks at Sweden's role in WWII, a less neutral position than one would think, and how, even decades later, there are secrets to be kept.
I really enjoyed this novel. The investigators were all fully developed, with relationships and conflicts already underway. The location was beautifully described, from the remote lake houses, accessible only by snowmobile to the dying northern villages, with their populations aged and dwindling. There's more here than a crime story.
The story begins with a hair-raising account from the point of view of a murdered girl. She and her boyfriend were out scuba diving on a remote lake when things go terribly wrong. She's a presence in the rest of the book, pulling our attention toward different characters. Since the reader knows who the victims were before the police do, and the perpetrators are identified fairly early on, the suspense rests on the motivations for the crime. The book looks at Sweden's role in WWII, a less neutral position than one would think, and how, even decades later, there are secrets to be kept.
I really enjoyed this novel. The investigators were all fully developed, with relationships and conflicts already underway. The location was beautifully described, from the remote lake houses, accessible only by snowmobile to the dying northern villages, with their populations aged and dwindling. There's more here than a crime story.