Darkness in the Forest

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Last Snow centers on Liv Bjornlund who lives with her miserly elderly father and her fatherless son. The book has flashbacks to show how Liv tried to escape from this dreary life, hitchhiking and picking up men for brief sex but somehow her father always knows where she is and brings her home. She settles, in the end, to bringing up her son but still dreaming of being elsewhere. Rumours of a hidden fortune in their shack ends up with the father dead.

We're introduced to other characters, all well written, but all seem to have their own secrets and we can't be sure that we know who did actually kill the father.

It's not a book full of dialogue. We're often in the mind of Liv or Liam, one of the two brothers who provide drugs to another recluse in the forest. I thought it was a bit slow to get going, not helped by slipping from one character to another or in flashback but once you got into that you could get into the story quite well.

The ending well, I thought it was going one way, and then another, and then another. But it was a good ending which helped give a finality to some of the characters. It is a dark novel in places - the control of family members, the downward spiral of drugs but well worth reading.