IT is every parent's nightmare : my child is missing.
The world was drawn into this mind scrambling torment more than 10 years ago when the little English girl Madeline McCann disappeared into the black night of the Algarve in Portugal.
Her fate remains unknown to this day but her parents' horror was given renewed focus with the release of the Netflix documentary series on the search for little Maddy who would now be nearing her teens.
For millions of viewers the awful angst of a missing child was given renewed focus.
Debut novelist Stina Jackson uses this process of parental grief as the central theme in a disturbing first work.
I was drawn to this book by the allure of the Scandanavian literary noir, that genre of crime writing that has served up a smorgasbord of tough, cynical characters and bleak settings?
Jo Nesbo has provided us with Harry Hole while Stieg Larsson's Girl with a Dragon Tatoo is imbued with great psychological intrigue.
Little wonder that one in four Norweigans picks up a book each day.
Literary debutante Stina Jackson who was born and raised in Skellefteå, northern Sweden and though she now lives in Denver, Colorado her first novel The Silver Road has all the ambiance of pure Scandanavian suspense
It has as its premise a father's search for a daughter missing after he left her at a bus stop three years ago and non-functional mother-daughter duo lured away to a new home through an internet search site.
I was tempted initially by a promise of Scandanavian angst and suspense.
The Silver Road has much of this with a haunting, dark look at broken and twisted families, desperate and dysfunctional.
The atmosphere is not a typical page-turner, rather a slow burner, enough to keep the heat of intrigue but no searing suspense.
At time there are nuances of language use that show inappropriate choice of words but the book remains a skilled translation.
The world was drawn into this mind scrambling torment more than 10 years ago when the little English girl Madeline McCann disappeared into the black night of the Algarve in Portugal.
Her fate remains unknown to this day but her parents' horror was given renewed focus with the release of the Netflix documentary series on the search for little Maddy who would now be nearing her teens.
For millions of viewers the awful angst of a missing child was given renewed focus.
Debut novelist Stina Jackson uses this process of parental grief as the central theme in a disturbing first work.
I was drawn to this book by the allure of the Scandanavian literary noir, that genre of crime writing that has served up a smorgasbord of tough, cynical characters and bleak settings?
Jo Nesbo has provided us with Harry Hole while Stieg Larsson's Girl with a Dragon Tatoo is imbued with great psychological intrigue.
Little wonder that one in four Norweigans picks up a book each day.
Literary debutante Stina Jackson who was born and raised in Skellefteå, northern Sweden and though she now lives in Denver, Colorado her first novel The Silver Road has all the ambiance of pure Scandanavian suspense
It has as its premise a father's search for a daughter missing after he left her at a bus stop three years ago and non-functional mother-daughter duo lured away to a new home through an internet search site.
I was tempted initially by a promise of Scandanavian angst and suspense.
The Silver Road has much of this with a haunting, dark look at broken and twisted families, desperate and dysfunctional.
The atmosphere is not a typical page-turner, rather a slow burner, enough to keep the heat of intrigue but no searing suspense.
At time there are nuances of language use that show inappropriate choice of words but the book remains a skilled translation.