Murder & Scandal in a Tiny Swedish Town Make for a Perfect Winter's Evening ("What I'm Reading Wednesday"...)
"What I'm Reading Wednesday"...
Since I'm actually headed to Scandinavia, soon, it seemed fitting to choose something by one of the Scandi authors in my TBR list for this week.
Sweden's number-one-selling native author is Camilla Läckberg, whose work falls into the mystery, thriller, and police procedural genres (in other words, Scandi-noir, one of my fave subsets). And now, after (finally) reading the first in her "Fjällbacka" series, it isn't hard to see why.
A tiny little town on the west coast of Sweden, Fjällbacka is much nearer Norway and Denmark, than to Stockholm. As it's Läckberg's hometown, she's able to give a good feel for the place, along with conveying some of the attitudes common in such a small town (from the everyone-knows-everyone-else's-business aspect, to a widespread distaste for the "big city" and a sense of bemusement about why folks would want to live anywhere but their hamlet, to frustration over the influx of city dwellers, buying up houses to use as fancy vacation homes). It all rings true, and lends a certain air of genuine verisimilitude to her stories.
In The Ice Princess, the first in the series, we meet the main characters... namely, biographical author Erica Falck, recently returned to her hometown from Stockholm in order to clean out the family home following the death of her parents; and Patrik Hedstrom, a former classmate of Erica who now works for the Fjällbacka police force.
Erica has only been back a short time before she makes a shocking--and gruesome--discovery: the body of her long-ago best friend, Alexandra Wijkner (with whom she'd lost touch years ago), an apparent suicide. The problem is, everyone who knew Erica--from her grieving husband and parents to her business partner at the gallery she co-owned--are positive the terrified-at-the-sight-of-blood young woman would never kill herself... especially not by slitting her wrists in a bathtub.
But who, then, could have hated the woman so much as to do such a thing? Withdrawn and private she may have been, but she was well-enough thought of in the tiny community.
When Alex's parents ask for Erica's help, as their daughter's one-time best friend, Erica sets about doing a little investigating of her own... in part, because she wants to find out about the woman her former friend had become over the years apart, and also because she realizes that Alex's life (and death) would make a fascinating book (far more so, to her, at least, than the dusty biographies of famous women she'd been writing).
Joining forces with Patrik, what follows is the unraveling of years of history which very few people knew about... and which those same few people would much rather stay dead and buried.
Written in a very easy style (point of fact, at times actually a bit too easy for my taste), The Ice Princess is a satisfying read. There's definitely a sense of set-up--of learning the back stories of characters we'll see more of--but that's par for the course. And, while the main characters themselves feel rather predictable [Does the reader know Erica and Patrik will wind up together from the first moment they see each other again? Why, yes, if said reader has read anything else, ever, lol...] Is that really such a bad thing, though? No, because those characters are likable, and provide a solid framework for a very interesting tale to unfold (as well as creating a backdrop for future stories in the series).
The Ice Princess makes for perfect winter reading... curled up on a sofa with a nice glass of wine, a cozy throw, and a snuggly feline companion. (That's how I read it, anyway... :))
~GlamKitty
Since I'm actually headed to Scandinavia, soon, it seemed fitting to choose something by one of the Scandi authors in my TBR list for this week.
Sweden's number-one-selling native author is Camilla Läckberg, whose work falls into the mystery, thriller, and police procedural genres (in other words, Scandi-noir, one of my fave subsets). And now, after (finally) reading the first in her "Fjällbacka" series, it isn't hard to see why.
A tiny little town on the west coast of Sweden, Fjällbacka is much nearer Norway and Denmark, than to Stockholm. As it's Läckberg's hometown, she's able to give a good feel for the place, along with conveying some of the attitudes common in such a small town (from the everyone-knows-everyone-else's-business aspect, to a widespread distaste for the "big city" and a sense of bemusement about why folks would want to live anywhere but their hamlet, to frustration over the influx of city dwellers, buying up houses to use as fancy vacation homes). It all rings true, and lends a certain air of genuine verisimilitude to her stories.
Erica has only been back a short time before she makes a shocking--and gruesome--discovery: the body of her long-ago best friend, Alexandra Wijkner (with whom she'd lost touch years ago), an apparent suicide. The problem is, everyone who knew Erica--from her grieving husband and parents to her business partner at the gallery she co-owned--are positive the terrified-at-the-sight-of-blood young woman would never kill herself... especially not by slitting her wrists in a bathtub.
But who, then, could have hated the woman so much as to do such a thing? Withdrawn and private she may have been, but she was well-enough thought of in the tiny community.
When Alex's parents ask for Erica's help, as their daughter's one-time best friend, Erica sets about doing a little investigating of her own... in part, because she wants to find out about the woman her former friend had become over the years apart, and also because she realizes that Alex's life (and death) would make a fascinating book (far more so, to her, at least, than the dusty biographies of famous women she'd been writing).
Joining forces with Patrik, what follows is the unraveling of years of history which very few people knew about... and which those same few people would much rather stay dead and buried.
Written in a very easy style (point of fact, at times actually a bit too easy for my taste), The Ice Princess is a satisfying read. There's definitely a sense of set-up--of learning the back stories of characters we'll see more of--but that's par for the course. And, while the main characters themselves feel rather predictable [Does the reader know Erica and Patrik will wind up together from the first moment they see each other again? Why, yes, if said reader has read anything else, ever, lol...] Is that really such a bad thing, though? No, because those characters are likable, and provide a solid framework for a very interesting tale to unfold (as well as creating a backdrop for future stories in the series).
The Ice Princess makes for perfect winter reading... curled up on a sofa with a nice glass of wine, a cozy throw, and a snuggly feline companion. (That's how I read it, anyway... :))
~GlamKitty
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