The Ice Princess, by Camilla Läckberg (REVIEW) -- Murder & Scandal in a Tiny Swedish Town Make for a Perfect Winter's Evening
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 or Nordic 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 P...