In 2009, at a cairn close to the small industrial town of Ormberg in northern Sweden, the remains of a small girl were found by a group of teenagers, but the child was never identified. Malin was the teenager who first found the skeleton but, to escape her claustrophobic, insular hometown, with all its unpleasant associations, she has moved to Stockholm to become a police officer. However, in 2017, when a cold-case team is created to investigate this unsolved murder, her knowledge of the town and surrounding area of forest makes her an ideal candidate to join it. Whilst she is excited to be assigned to her first murder case and wants to be of use in the investigation, she feels very ambivalent about returning to the town she has tried so hard to escape.
Psychological profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön and her both personal and professional partner, Investigator Peter Lindgren, are also invited to assist with the investigation. However, Hanne is trying to keep her early-onset dementia a secret not only from Peter but from all her colleagues and, as an aide-memoir, has started to write everything down in her diary. Just days into the investigation Peter goes missing and Hanne is found in the late evening by Jake, a local teenager; she is barefooted, bleeding and in a very confused state. She has no recollection of what has happened or where Peter is and, in her confusion, she drops her diary. When a passing motorist stops to help, Jake is desperate to leave before having to identify himself; he has a huge secret which it is vital for him to keep but before he leaves the scene he picks up Hanne’s diary and takes it home. When the body of a woman is discovered nearby, along with one of Hanne’s shoes, which is covered in the victim’s blood, the team have to consider what her role is and whether there is a link with their cold case. Is it possible that Hanne’s diary, which only Jake is aware of, could hold the key to what happened?
This haunting, tension-filled story is told, in short chapters, from the points of view of Malin, Jake and, through excerpts from her diary, Hanne. Through these characters Camilla Grebe gradually reveals, in a very credible way, the labyrinthine connections between past and present events, maintaining a tension which made me reluctant to put the book down. Each of the characters is well-developed and, by the final page, they had imprinted themselves on me in a very powerful and affecting way.
Malin’s personal struggles were captured in a psychologically convincing way, gradually showing the influences which had determined her need to try to escape from her traumatic memories and her hometown, a place which had felt too constraining and yet which continues to have the power to affect her behaviour as an adult. Her recognition of the re-emergence of attitudes and beliefs she thought she had abandoned when she moved away was, at times, recognisably disturbing. She wasn’t always an easy character to like but I felt able to understand why she held the views she did.
From the start I felt huge empathy with Jake, soon aching for him as I became caught up in the dilemmas he faced as he attempted to come to terms with his feelings about his fractured family, his identity, the secret he was desperate to keep because of his fears about how people would react if they discovered it, and his realisation that, by keeping the diary from the police, he was probably impeding their investigations.
Hanne’s storyline, as a she tried so hard to hold onto her old self and her professional skills whilst trying to cope with her worsening dementia, often felt almost unbearable to read. However, the author dealt with this in a sensitive and caring way, allowing her character to hold onto some hope that she still had something to offer.
Whilst it is an entertaining and convincing crime story, what makes this novel so much more complex and satisfying is its evocative portrayal of life in a small, remote town, a town which has faced the closure of the factories which had previously provided employment for so many of its residents. These closures have led to a cycle of poverty and a sense of desperation amongst its residents. With so many people unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, when those factories are converted into an asylum centre for refugees, resentment against the immigrants, who appear to be getting lots of help from the government whilst the needs of the local people are ignored, grows. So too does the suspicion that the recent murder must be have been committed by one of the refugees, any thought that it could be a local is rejected. The well-evoked portrayal of an inward-looking, isolated and deprived community, uniting against a “common enemy”, adds an important extra dimension to the atmospheric nature of the author’s story-telling.
Although I had guessed who the killer was sometime before the end of the story, there was a brilliant twist which I certainly didn’t see coming! This has left me hoping that in the next story in this series (this book is the second but can very easily be read as a stand-alone story) the author will be explore the ongoing impact of this revelation on the characters involved.
The exploration of topics such as the effects on a community of an influx of refugees, especially when this is into deprived communities in which the local residents feel ignored by the government, xenophobia, personal and sexual identity, alcoholism, mental illness, dementia, fears of rejection and various manifestations of grief and loss all combine to make this novel an excellent choice for reading groups.