"In a small town you’re always fully exposed to other people. And to yourself."
After She's Gone: A Novel (Hanne Lagerlind-Schön #2)
by Camilla Grebe
The skeleton of an infant girl is found near a cairn by teenagers making out. It's 2009. A place where a local legend about the Ghostly Child is centered. The cairn is like a ley line for the small village of Ormberg, a crossroads, attracting all sorts of misery and mystery.
Fast forward to 2017 and we have a young woman found dead near that same cairn, a police profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön, is found in the surrounding forest suffering from hypothermia memory loss, and her partner in life and work, has disappeared.
This gritty story is told in tandem by two people. Jake a teenage boy whose guilty secret impedes the investigation and Marlin the policewoman who was the teenager who found the skeleton all those years ago. Alongside murder we become privet to personal struggles of Jake and Marlin and their places within this tight knit community.
Set in the Arctic depths of Sweden this is a gripping story with twists that make your head spin. Ormberg is an unlikely area for a refugee asylum camp, as many of the townspeople obviously feel. And the reasons for the resentments of the townspeople are interestingly handled. The locals feel like a forgotten people who themselves have been displaced and forgotten by their own government. So resentments breed. But of course things are never this simple. The asylum seekers stories are juxtaposed against the brooding background of this small village where the people have become trapped in a cycle of poverty.
Grebe has handled the situation of Hanne whose loss of memory seems more and more likely to be the onset of dementia with dignity and compelling insight. If Hanne is suffering this illness, how has it not been seen before now?
The challenge of refugees within small communities, the grappling for understanding and acceptance amidst fears of change and loss is faced head on.
Underneath of course is the ongoing mystery of the dead, treated in brilliant Nordic noir fashion by Grebe
I must admit that at first I wondered where this was going. I wasn't too far in before I was totally hooked. I couldn't put this intriguing thriller down.
A NetGalley ARC
*****
by Camilla Grebe
Fast forward to 2017 and we have a young woman found dead near that same cairn, a police profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön, is found in the surrounding forest suffering from hypothermia memory loss, and her partner in life and work, has disappeared.
This gritty story is told in tandem by two people. Jake a teenage boy whose guilty secret impedes the investigation and Marlin the policewoman who was the teenager who found the skeleton all those years ago. Alongside murder we become privet to personal struggles of Jake and Marlin and their places within this tight knit community.
Set in the Arctic depths of Sweden this is a gripping story with twists that make your head spin. Ormberg is an unlikely area for a refugee asylum camp, as many of the townspeople obviously feel. And the reasons for the resentments of the townspeople are interestingly handled. The locals feel like a forgotten people who themselves have been displaced and forgotten by their own government. So resentments breed. But of course things are never this simple. The asylum seekers stories are juxtaposed against the brooding background of this small village where the people have become trapped in a cycle of poverty.
Grebe has handled the situation of Hanne whose loss of memory seems more and more likely to be the onset of dementia with dignity and compelling insight. If Hanne is suffering this illness, how has it not been seen before now?
The challenge of refugees within small communities, the grappling for understanding and acceptance amidst fears of change and loss is faced head on.
Underneath of course is the ongoing mystery of the dead, treated in brilliant Nordic noir fashion by Grebe
I must admit that at first I wondered where this was going. I wasn't too far in before I was totally hooked. I couldn't put this intriguing thriller down.
A NetGalley ARC
*****
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