Category: Scandinavia

The Mist

5/6/2020

Ragnar Jónasson: Penguin $12.99 Kindle e-book

CHRISTMAS in Iceland is traditionally a season for giving new-release novels as presents, reading by candlelight and dining on smoked local lamb. It is not a season for finding uninvited visitors on one’s snow-covered doorstep.
When an unfamiliar man arrives at Erla and Einar Einarsson’s farm near Höfn in the east of the country, the couple feel obliged to offer him shelter. A blizzard is brewing and he’s on foot, having lost his way while out shooting ptarmigan with friends from Reykjavík – or so he says. His story is weak, however: he’s not carrying a gun, after all, and he claims not to have noticed their daughter Anna’s house as he approached the Einarsson property even though he followed the main road directly past it.
At the western extremity of the island, Hulda Hermannsdóttir is struggling to corral her own family into celebrating appropriately this year.
Husband Jón refuses to take teenager Dimma’s withdrawn, reclusive behaviour seriously, despite Hulda demanding that they consult a psychologist. It’s just typical adolescence, Jón insists. They’re yet to choose and decorate a Christmas tree, the last few gifts still haven’t been bought and the prospect of having her mother visit is gnawing at Hulda. What should be a happy, peaceful period is anything but.
Away from her chaotic homelife, a day in the office is equally excruciating for police officer Hulda. A young woman has been missing for months and her parents are frantic. Returning a phonecall from the girl’s family is right at the top of Hulda’s to-do list.
The third and final instalment in Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland series (also known as ‘the Hulda triology’), The Mist precedes both The Darkness and The Island chronologically in the saga of Hulda and her family so elaborates on situations only hinted at in the first two releases.

Niche Writing

27/3/2020

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $7.99 Kindle e-book

WRITING being the solitary pursuit that it is, few readers have the chance to truly explore the steps through which their favourite books are born.
Challenging himself to lay bare his literary process does not intimidate Christoffer Petersen, however.
In recent years Petersen – a Brit whose chosen pen name is quintessentially Danish – has produced dozens of novels, novellas and short stories and at the same time established for this stable its own ‘Arctic noir’ niche.
Not only has Petersen created these stories, he has also doubled as the independent publisher of both hardcopy and electronic editions through Aarluuk Press. Most recently he has taken his involvement to the extreme by adding an e-book ordering portal to his website, enabling him to control the all-important sales and distribution.
Now, in a guide intended for “emerging authors, amateur writers and readers”, Petersen explores his chosen pathway in a step-by-step analysis of what has worked, and why, along his journey to becoming self-sufficient.
Characters such as David Maratse, Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Fenna Brongaard, Freja Hansen and Jon Østergård are the human face of the battle against crime in Petersen’s Greenland and Denmark, occasionally venturing further afield to pursue a suspect in the US, Canada, the UK or Iceland. His own experiences in and understanding of these locations fuels descriptions with precisely the degree of detail that’s needed to engage the public and generate enticing backdrops to his action sequences.
Petersen’s ‘how to’ sections are grouped into two clear themes: ‘niche’ and ‘writing’ – the who, what, why, where, when and how of finding, defining, developing and populating a niche with original content that will sell, and of then sitting down at a desk to generate this. Presented in manageable, bite-sized chapters, his advice is both practical and motivational, delivering sound guidelines to drive planning and productivity.

Mourning in Malmö

17/1/2020

Torquil MacLeod: Torquil MacLeod Books $3.15 (Kindle e-book)

EIGHT hundred and fifty-two people died when the Baltic ferry MS Estonia sank just after 1am on September 28 1994.
It remains the deadliest peacetime shipping disaster ever in European waters and the second-worst involving a European-flagged vessel after RMS Titanic’s loss more than 80 years earlier.
In the midst of a ferocious storm, roughly midway between Tallinn, Estonia, and Stockholm, Sweden, the ferry shuddered violently, then began taking on water and quickly capsized. The wreck was never salvaged and most of the bodies now lie trapped on the sea floor.
Conspiracy theories abound. With the former Eastern Bloc disintegrating, in the early 1990s cross-border smuggling of people, technology and equipment was rife. Is it possible something or someone on Estonia that night could not be allowed to reach land?
Among those on board was Anita Sundström’s father, Jens Ullman. Now a police inspector, Sundström has never fully understood the circumstances surrounding her papa’s death. The surfacing of a tenuous link between Estonia and a pair of baffling attacks in Malmö, southern Sweden, reignites her curiosity.
Markus Jolis has attempted to murder his elderly wife with a kitchen knife and then reported his own crime to the authorities; he has dementia, however, and can’t so much as recall – let alone explain – this bizarre behaviour.
In the same city, businessman Iqbal Nawaz has been found bludgeoned on the periphery of a sports ground, apparently overpowered while jogging. The forensics team reports that the weapon used is wooden and ridged but so far nothing of this type has been found.
Against a backdrop of cross-cultural distrust and entrenched prejudice, Sundström pushes the boundaries of her sometimes-conflicting roles as a senior officer, professional colleague, long-distance girlfriend and doting grandmother. As she juggles her priorities, one misstep could cost Sundström much more than just a figurative rap over the knuckles at work.

The Calendar Man | The Twelfth Night

29/11/2019

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $5.99 each Kindle e-books

DANISH-BASED author Christoffer Petersen’s Christmas offering to fans of Arctic noir is a pair of seasonally themed novellas designed to be enjoyed progressively across the Advent–New Year period.
The action in the first of the two releases, The Calendar Man, begins on December 1 and continues in bite-sized chapters that can be read in less than 15 minutes per day throughout the lead-up to Christmas, culminating on Christmas Eve, when Scandinavians (including Greenlanders) celebrate by sharing meals and opening gifts together. It is the literary equivalent of the 24-part Julekalendere programs broadcast on television every year and the internationally popular windowed wall calendars.
The second picks up the storyline on January 5 and runs for 48 hours to end early on the morning immediately after Twelfth Night, or Mitaartut.
Both feature a cast of central characters introduced in Petersen’s previous series, set in the same location a quarter of a century earlier: police colleagues Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Gaba Alatak, Aqqa Danielsen and Atii Napa and politician’s daughter Pipaluk Uutaaq from Greenland Crime, and Iiluuna Mattikalaat, a troubled child from Arctic Short Stories.
Even in 2042 serious crime is rare in Greenland – so rare that when an Advent calendar is found on a mutilated body in the capital, Nuuk, Commissioner Jensen is recalled to duty despite being on extended leave at the time.
First Minister Uutaaq is taking no chances with law and order in her rapidly developing city. A vote on independence from King Frederik’s Denmark is looming and nothing – not even a cryptic and very public corpse – can be allowed to derail the democratic process.
Juxtaposing the elements of a contemporary crime thriller with the warmth of traditional festivities in a remote, otherworldly setting, Petersen serves up a glimpse into a culture as exotic and mysterious to outsiders as it is rich and welcoming.

Blackout Ingenue

27/9/2019

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24

DETECTIVE Freja Hansen’s private life is anything but easy.
Her husband Adam – a former member of Denmark’s riot police – is drug-addicted and banished from the home she shares with their daughter Ayoe and the little girl’s grandfather Esben, and Freja herself is still recovering from a knife wound suffered during what should have been a leisurely cross-country run through the Scottish Highlands. Complicating things further, Adam is now employed by a powerful businessman who years ago tried to prey on Freja.
Professionally, on the other hand, she is very much in control. As a senior officer stationed at Sønderborg in central Denmark, Freja has a challenging and fulfilling position doing meaningful work. At least that much is on track.
When billionaire theatre patron Jeanne Fønss is killed in a bizarre coincidence on the opening night of a play, it appears to be nothing more than a straight-forward case of a frail elderly woman having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, having one’s neck broken when a leading lady plummets into the audience could hardly be suspicious, especially when a stagehand admits to having been with the now-dead actress just before she overbalanced from a gantry 16 metres above the plush velvet seats. This certainly doesn’t require a detective of Freja’s ability.
Why she has been assigned this new investigation is therefore baffling. Is her boss – apparently under the misapprehension that Freja is yet to recover emotionally from her stabbing – determined to exclude her from real policing?
Yet, despite the situation’s apparent simplicity, as Freja and Sergeant Mik Kristensen compare statements, something doesn’t seem right. So consistent are the accounts that surely the confession must have been rehearsed – but why?
Blackout Ingenue is the first full-length novel in a new series introduced by the short story The Fell Runner.

A Wolf at the Gate

6/9/2019

Lexie Conyngham: The Kellas Cat Press $5.44 Kindle e-book

BARELY have Ketil Gunnarson and the coastal raiding party he’s helping to lead landed on English soil when a stranger appears at their riverside camp with a message from the remote Norse settlement Orkney. Earl Thorfinn, no less, is requesting Ketil’s immediate return to the islands.
Struggling to cling to power in the midst of would-be usurpers’ relentless attacks against him, Thorfinn has welcomed the appearance of an influential religious delegation from Colonia in Saxony – a northwestern region of continental Europe that nearly a thousand years later will be part of Germany.
Ketil’s arrival back at the earl’s stronghold in Birsay a few days later is ill-timed, however.
With his Icelandic offsider, Lambi, he has scarcely had time to resume feasting in the familiar hall of Thorfinn and his wife Ingibjorg when a death is reported. A neighbour of Ketil’s childhood friend Sigrid has been found dead – and the presence of an axe protruding from his skill suggests it wasn’t accidental.
Suspicion is cast in a multitude of directions, not least of all at Lambi: a foreigner with an unknown past who has been accused of stealing a valuable drinking cup from a fellow Norseman.
Further complicating an already-uncomfortable situation, one of the Saxon visitors is an acquaintance Ketil had been hoping to avoid seeing again.
In the second instalment of her Orkneyinga Murders series, Scottish author Lexie Conyngham overlays a cast of complex characters on the real-life backdrop of 11th-century Orkney as described in detail in one of Iceland’s best known Old Norse sagas.
Both Thorfinn and Ingibjorg are documented historical figures, first introduced to Conyngham’s readers in Tomb for an Eagle, and the tumbledown-stone remains of their quarters and wider community at Birsay can still be visited, injecting an added dash of factual fascination to this fast-moving mystery.

A Nearly Normal Family

16/8/2019

MT Edvardsson: Macmillan $29.99

“STELLA Sandell is under reasonable suspicion for murder.”
They’re the words no parent contemplates ever having to hear: that courtroom proclamation by a stranger that a beloved child is facing one of the most serious charges imaginable.
For pastor Adam and criminal lawyer Ulrika, life in the southern Swedish university city of Lund has always been comfortingly unremarkable. White-collar professionals with an upper-class income and an easy-going, stable suburban lifestyle, the Sandells holiday abroad in winter, dine out regularly at their local Italian restaurant and enjoy cycling together along Lund’s cobble-stoned streets.
Stella has just completed her final year of high school, an occasionally tempestuous teenager employed part-time as a sales assistant at H&M as she saves for a long-awaited gap year in Asia.
Suddenly, though, over the course of only a few days the family’s world begins to unravel.
It starts with a missed work shift here, an early-hours arrival home from an evening out with her best friend there. Then Stella lists her brand-new pink Vespa scooter – an 18th-birthday gift from her mother and father – for sale online. This is a side of their daughter Adam and Ulrika don’t recognise.
But worse is to come. A phonecall late one Saturday night informs the couple that their little girl is being held in police custody, accused of having stabbed a prominent local businessman – the son of a well-known law professor, no less.
Surely Stella is no killer? Adam and Ulrika can’t conceive of a future with her in prison.
Yet unanswered questions begin to pile up, not least of all surrounding the fate of a piece of potential evidence: an apparently blood-spattered favourite shirt.
It’s a moral dilemma for the normally upstanding Sandells: exactly how far will the average person go, and what will they overlook, to defend someone they love?

Glass Woman

19/7/2019

Caroline Lea: Michael Joseph $29.99

IN DEEPLY religious 1686 it doesn’t take much to raise the suspicions of fearful Icelanders.
Simply being literate is enough to see a woman branded a witch and sentenced to die in the official drowning pool at Thingvellir, where Iceland’s parliament meets in summer; being caught reading runestones, mentioning the island’s troll-like huldufólk or referencing the old Icelandic sagas is punishable with even more brutal treatment.
After her bishop father dies, 25-year-old Rósa agrees in desperation to become the second wife of a stranger, Jón Eiríksson, the chieftain of a community many days’ ride to the northwest of her childhood home. After all, Jón will support her mother, Sigridúr, sparing the ailing widow an ordeal of starvation and freezing – the inevitable outcome for anyone without a provider to support them.
Jón’s original bride is dead, Rósa knows, overcome by a sudden fever, leaving him childless.
It will be Rósa’s duty to cook, clean, mend, spin, salt and dry, to help with farmwork and fishing, and to produce sons to carry on her husband’s legacy. Jón, for his part, will ensure Sigridúr receives a reliable supply of peat blocks and meat.
Although reluctant to leave her lifelong friend Páll, with no viable alternative Rósa arrives in the seaside settlement of Stykkishólmur willing to do her best not to displease her benefactor.
She quickly finds life is not as straightforward as she had hoped it would be, however.
Jón is absent from from before dawn until well after dusk day after day, leaving Rósa alone with orders not to speak to his subjects, and clearly prefers to spend time with his assistant, Pétur, rather than Rósa.
When mysterious noises and a feeling of being watched are added to the mix, Rósa’s nerves are soon every bit as fragile as the tiny glass figurine she keeps buried her pocket.

Devil's Fjord

31/5/2019

Davie Hewson: Severn House £20.99

WHEN a novel opens with the words “He was on the roof of their little cottage mowing the thick and umber turf” it’s safe to assume the story’s not set in London, New York or Tokyo.
Lawn-clad houses are commonplace in the Faroe Islands, however, adding a special dash of other-worldliness to the work of a crime writer seeking an exotic backdrop for an equally unpredictable plot.
In fictitious Djevulsfjord on the real-life island of Vágar, the community’s tightly intertwined fishing families subsist on ever-dwindling ocean harvests. Summer is almost at an end by the time Djevulsfjord makes its first substantial catch of the season: a pod of “blackfish”, or pilot whales.
As locals band together to divide up the result of the traditional grind, Benjamin and Jónas Mikkelsen skulk on the periphery, Benji towed along in the wake of his trouble-making younger brother.
District sheriff Tristan Haraldsen and his wife Elsebeth are foreigners on the west coast of Vágar, newly arrived as sea-changers from the relative metropolis of the Faroese capital, Tórshavn. Tristan’s job is to ensure the grind adheres to government regulations – a role that marks him as an outsider employed to observe while the rest of the village participates.
When the inevitable altercation occurs it’s 10-year-old Jónas who in a split-second of fury attacks, slashing Tristan with a whaling knife before fleeing with Benji onto the nearby mountain, Árnafjall.
Almost immediately the treeless moors, razor-edged crags and jagged cliffs seem to devour the pair, leaving no trace to be found by searchers.
The boys’ mother, Alba, waits in anguish. The previous year her own sibling, Kaspar, was killed by a fall from Árnafjall, and two other men either died or disappeared in unexplained circumstances at about the same time.
For such an insignificant hamlet Djevulsfjord is fast amassing an unnervingly long list of casualties.

The Island

3/5/2019

Ragnar Jónasson: Michael Joseph $32.99

ON AN isolated volcanic plateau in Iceland’s Westman Islands, surrounded by open ocean and populated ordinarily by only seabirds and sheep, four childhood friends reunite.
It’s a bittersweet time for the group, gathered now to honour a fifth member of their teenage-years posse, Katla, killed at the age of 20 exactly a decade earlier while spending a quiet weekend at her family’s wilderness cabin.
Katla’s younger brother Dagur is finally taking steps to overcome the horrendous event and the cascade of misery it triggered. The siblings’ father, accused of having murdered Katla, committed suicide while in custody and their mother, distraught, slipped further and further into malaise until Dagur had no choice but to admit her to a care home, where she continues to languish.
Now living alone, Dagur welcomes the chance to spend a few days away with Benedikt, Klara and Alexandra – three people with whom he grew up in a small satellite town on the fringe of Reykjavík.
It’s been 10 years since Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir lost her own daughter, Dimma, and eight years since her husband, Jón, died. Hulda’s career has stalled, leaving her trapped in a too-small flat barely paid for by a meagre mid-level police salary, and her prospects of gaining a much-needed promotion are all but non-existent.
Tragedy for the reminiscing foursome brings an unexpected change of fortune for Hulda, however, when a body is found below an intimidatingly sheer cliff near their holiday cottage.
As the senior officer on duty when the incident is logged she has first call on the case. Could this be an opportunity for Hulda to demonstrate her true ability at last?
This is the second book in Ragnar Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland trilogy: a prequel set a quarter of a century before The Darkness. The final instalment is scheduled for release next year.

Cold Bones

5/4/2019

David Mark: Mullholand Books $45.00 hardback or $19.99 Kindle

HULL is freezing – literally. Straddling the muddy estuary of the River Humber in northern England, this once-rich cod fishing port is experiencing its coldest winter in years.
At first it is hardly surprising that an elderly woman living alone is found dead, apparently having been unable to save herself after losing her balance in a bathful of rapidly cooling water.
Detective Sergeant Aector ‘Hector’ McAvoy quickly becomes suspicious, however. Small clues scattered around the site suggest at least one other person was present either during or immediately after former social worker Enid Chappell’s drowning.
More than 1600km to the north-west, McAvoy’s superior, Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, is on the isolated, wind-ravaged Skagi Peninsula in Iceland investigating the discovery of another body: that of a journalist believed to have a tenuous connection with Hull.
Not too many decades earlier the two locations were waging an unofficial war as newly independent Iceland turned its gunships against the English trawlers that threatened to strip its territorial waters of irreplaceable fish stocks. Now Icelandic police are being pressured to co-operate with Pharaoh in a covert alliance.
With his attempts to uncover a potential motive for the murder of Chappell stagnating McAvoy finds his attention diverted by a series of gruesome attacks on elderly fishermen throughout the city – longtime crewmates who once served together on one of Hull’s most tragically infamous cod boats. Who could possibly have cause to harm feeble old men who by all accounts have been working to create a public tribute to the industry that for generations supported thousands of Hull residents?
A failed bid to uncover the identity of two corpses washed ashore in the Russian Arctic is yet another frustration for McAvoy’s colleagues at Humberside Police.
It seems progress has stalled on every front – and time is running short as powerful people demand results.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes

8/3/2019

Alexander McCall Smith: Penguin Random House US$16.00

SURELY any incident demanding police intervention is sensitive, Detective Ulf Varg’s fellow law-enforcement officers reason. This much is self-evident. Why, then, should a select few cases be singled out to receive special attention from an independent team within the force?
This is the question that shadows Varg as he battles to focus his mind in equal measures clearly on the job and firmly off his attractive married colleague Anna. The two are at the core of ‘sensitive’ investigations in Malmö, Sweden’s southernmost city and home to more than just the occasional curious offence.
Ulf Varg – a man whose given and family names mean ‘wolf’ ‘wolf’ in Swedish and Danish respectively – heads a department tasked with investigating the unexpected, the unorthodox and the just plain kooky – and none is more left-field than the latest baffler: the stabbing of a market stallholder in the back of one knee. Stabbing, yes – but midway down the leg? What sort of criminal would stoop – literally – to do such a nonsensical thing?
Solving this mystery will require Varg and his colleagues to set aside conventional thinking.
For Varg this is hardly a challenge; he is, after all, the owner of Sweden’s first and only lip-reading dog.
However, throw in commercial sabotage on the back of infidelity and the disappearance of an imaginary boyfriend and the workload for Varg and his new offsider Blomquist suddenly starts to look all-consuming.
From the king of lighthearted quirk comes this debut title in a new series of feel-good fun and frivolity, defined by author McCall Smith himself as being the antithesis of deep, dark, brooding Nordic noir: a new genre labelled ‘Nordic blanc’.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes contains a preview of the planned follow-up, The Talented Mr Varg. Two novellas published exclusively as Kindle editions – The Strange Case of the Moderate Extremists and Varg in Love – are prequels.

Liv

18/1/2019

Mikaela Bley: Scribe $32.99

FOR Swedish TV journalist Ellen Tamm, a few days at her family’s estate on a relatively isolated island about an hour’s drive outside Stockholm is supposed to form part of an emotional rehabilitation plan.
Crime reporter Tamm is still reeling from the after-effects of her entanglement in the disappearance and death of a young girl, Lycke (the subject and title of author Mikaela Bley’s debut novel), in the city earlier in the year and that case’s reawakening of memories of her own twin sister’s drowning when they were children.
For the past several months has been unable to work. In fact, she is barely holding her life together, leaving the rent on her apartment unpaid, eating poorly if at all and closing herself off from her friends and colleagues.
On her way to the island, however, Tamm drives straight into a tiny satellite community in upheaval. A woman’s body has been found in a vehicle that morning and police have an area of the roadway cordoned off.
Should Tamm continue on as scheduled to spend the allocated time being fussed over by her controlling mother, or should she instead give in to her professional instinct and start digging for information on this new victim? She is, after all, the first member of the media to have arrived on the scene, even if her presence there is due to sheer chance.
As details of motorist Liv’s identity are unravelled Tamm discovers a world of anti-social behaviour, unconventional relationships, public deception and personal betrayal that pushes her ever-deeper into the darkness of self-doubt, mistrust and fear. Has she made an error of judgement from which she will never be able to recover this time?
A psychological thriller with deeply disturbing themes at its heart, Liv inhabits the unseemly underbelly of the outwardly picture-perfect existence of middle-class Swedes.

Northern Light

21/12/2018

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24.99

CONSTABLE Hákan Sigurdsson is faced with an unpalatable choice: volunteer to join the world’s least-established multinational law enforcement task force, Polarpol, based at sea in the Arctic, or be dismissed from his position with the Icelandic police by none other than his own sister, Reykjavik’s commissioner.
To be fair, it’s not an ideal situation for Jenny Sigurdsdóttir, either. Since his marriage disintegrated her brother has been out of control – angry, disengaged, bitter and, increasingly often, at least half drunk.
For his daughter’s sake, if nothing else, Sigurdsson must refocus. Perhaps this unexpected posting will become his salvation.
At the same time, English IT genius Adrian Seabrook has a secret he’s desperate to spill. Seabrook has decided that a high-profile cybersecurity conference in Reykjavik will provide just the global audience he’s been seeking.
Not everyone is as eager as Seabrook to have the information shared, however.
As the date of his planned public revelation nears, the would-be whistleblower finds himself under attack. Assassination attempts are made; two of his closest aides are killed.
Among those with Seabrook in their sights are Byrne Cantrell and Edie Teal, a couple whose passion for each other is exceeded only by their passion for creating human carnage. Together they are one of the deadliest combinations for hire anywhere on the planet, determined to complete one last assignment before packing away their concealed weapons and settling down to a life of baby-raising bliss. The hit on Seabrook will be their spectacular finale.
Polarpol has barely been commissioned when suddenly Sigurdsson and his new colleagues – one representative each from Canada, Alaska and Russia – are called into action.
Now, Seabrook’s chances of leaving Iceland alive hinge solely on the efficacy of Polarpol’s untested team.
Northern Light is the first book in a series derived from Christoffer Petersen’s Greenland thrillers featuring Sergeant Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen.

My Polar Dream

23/11/2018

Jade Hameister: Macmillan Australia, $29.99

JADE Hameister has always been an exceptional achiever.
Aged six she walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko.
At 12 she convinced her parents to take her on a family hike through the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp.
The following year, at 13 Hameister set her sights on reaching the South Pole.
Only one obstacle stood in her way: the Hameisters’ chosen guide insisted she be at least 16 years old before attempting such a gruelling expedition.
Undaunted, she decided to kill time with a couple of relatively straightforward warm-up treks: to the North Pole and across the Greenland icecap.
Never having skied, she prepared with a few days’ training in New Zealand’s South Island, then set out from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway determined to become the youngest person ever to ski entirely unsupported and unassisted from outside the final degree of latitude to the most northerly point in the world.
Along the way her youthful ambition, inspiring teenage message and passionate environmental focus caught the attention of both the National Geographic Society (which engaged a videographer to accompany Hameister and her father on each of their three increasingly taxing challenges) and the team behind the global phenomenon of TEDx talks.
Those same characteristics quickly drew the ire of a cohort of anonymous online trolls, however, who used the phrase “Make me a sandwich” to suggest Hameister’s true purpose as a woman should be to wait on men.
Her reply – along with the nearly three years’ worth of agony, frustration, ecstasy and relief that preceded it as she completed her sub-zero hat-trick – is recounted in Hameister’s own voice, from the joy of opening special letters written by her closest school friends to the physical torture of hauling twice her own bodyweight in a sled over jagged ridges of ice.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99

IF THERE'S one dominant theme running through Edvard Hirifjell’s life it’s undoubtedly ‘blanks’: the gaping memory blanks that have always pockmarked his early-childhood recollections and now, unexpectedly, the solid timber blanks from which the highest-quality shotgun stocks are carved.
For 20-something years Edvard has known only a quiet, semi-reclusive existence on a potato farm in an agricultural hamlet near Lillehammer in southern Norway. When not tending the crop with his bestefar (grandfather) Sverre he fills his meagre free time with photography and fishing. He has few friends but is not particularly lonely.
Theirs is a typical rural lifestyle in all but one respect: Edvard is an orphan, having lost his parents in an unsolved incident almost 2000km removed from their property at Saksum when he was just a toddler.
When his home circumstances change suddenly Edvard begins a journey of yearning that stretches first to the wind-lashed Shetland Islands and then to the battlefields of northern France.
In treeless Shetland he unearths a clue that tantalises with its potential to explain the mystery of his father and mother’s deaths and at the same time raises the possibility of a family inheritance intertwined with a fabled stand of 16 centuries-old walnut trees warped by World War I combat into a near-priceless resource.
The young man who leaves behind the paddocks and sheds of Saksum to search for crucial pointers in Shetland soon finds himself heading south due, with the remnant woods of Authuille in the Somme as his ultimate destination.
Weaving together the carefully researched details of actual events and locations with an engaging imagined plot, this novel is rich with the history of two world wars and the intimacies of Nordic culture both in Norway itself and across the scattered former Viking settlements of modern-day Scotland’s most remote island group.

Whiteout

21/12/2017

Ragnar Jónasson: Orenda Books $19.99

ICELAND publishes more books per capita than any other country on Earth.
In December the population of 330,000 Icelandic-speakers observes a tradition known as the ‘Christmas book flood’: a full year’s worth of new titles is launched in a roughly week-long deluge, just in time to be wrapped (accompanied by a block of the finest-quality chocolate each) and gifted on Christmas Eve. Icelanders typically then spend the rest of that night snuggled up reading and snacking.
It’s little wonder Iceland’s literature is among some of the sharpest, most beautifully crafted anywhere in the world, influenced by an awe-inspiring, hauntingly bleak landscape, a small-town national psyche and a pervasive, disorienting mid-winter gloom.
Set in the immediate lead-up to Christmas, Whiteout is complete with its own reference to the customary Yuletide exchange of printed matter.
The fifth title in Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series, it continues the story of regional detective Ari Thór Arason and his police-force superior Tómas , now based in the capital, Reykjavík.
Ari Thór’s plans to spend the holiday season at home in Siglufjörður are disrupted by the discovery of a young woman’s body at the base of a cliff at Kálfshamarsvík on Iceland’s remote northwest coastline.
It seems she has jumped – or has she?
In fact, Ásta’s is the third apparent suicide to have occurred in almost-identically inexplicable circumstances – first her mother’s, then her younger sister’s in the girls’ childhood more than 20 years earlier, and now her own during an uncharacteristic, impulsive visit to the lighthouse her father once managed.
Suspicion sweeps across the elderly caretakers of the estate, housekeeper Thóra and her brother Óskar, and its businessman-owner Reynir and his neighbour and part-time farm worker Arnór.
Given the setting’s extreme isolation, this latest death must have involved at least one of these four people – but which one, and why?

Fatal Crossing

15/12/2017

Lone Theils: Echo $29.99

STILL deeply shell-shocked in the wake of interviewing a genocidal Rwandan teacher, journalist Nora Sand decides to distract herself from reality with a couple of minutes of retail therapy. In the sleepy surroundings of a small seaside village it’s impossible to know the ramifications her impulsive decision to buy a battered old leather suitcase will have.
As Danish news magazine Globalt’s UK correspondent, Sand is on assignment with a photographer-friend on the south coast of England when she makes her purchase.
Much later, back home in her inner-city apartment in London, she discovers a bundle of Polaroid photographs secreted behind its frayed lining.
One in particular catches her attention. Its subjects are two teenagers standing in front of a sign that reads ‘Car Deck 2’ – but the language isn’t English; it’s Danish.
When Sand recognises the taller girl as one of two orphans who vanished in the mid 1980s from a cross-channel ferry from Denmark while on an outing with their carers, her professional curiosity and investigative instincts are piqued.
Attempting to piece together the background to Lisbeth and Lulu’s still-unsolved disappearance leads Sand into the law-enforcement world of her highschool classmate Andreas Jansson, a fellow Dane now based temporarily in London while studying anti-terrorism with the British police at New Scotland Yard. Complicating the situation, Sand and Jansson have never resolved an awkward conversation that scarred their once-rock-solid bond years earlier.
When the name of infamous UK serial killer William ‘Bill Hix’ Hickley surfaces in Sand’s research, the importance of retracing the Danish girls’ last known movements takes on renewed urgency.
Could this maniac – a man who kept the tongues of his female victims as trophies – have somehow crossed paths with Lisbeth and Lulu during their travels abroad, or might they instead have fallen victim to an unknown accomplice of Hickley’s, or perhaps a copycat?

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $1.30 / $3.99 Kindle e-books

COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

Lycke

6/10/2017

Mikaela Bley: Scribe $32.99

WHEN eight-year-old Lycke Höök vanishes from a neighbourhood tennis complex in Stockholm, Sweden, it’s not only members of the little girl’s immediate family who are traumatised.
For TV news crime reporter Ellen Tamm, Lycke’s unexplained disappearance unleashes still-ragged recollections of a terrifyingly similar upheaval in her own childhood two decades earlier.
Delivered to her regular Friday afternoon coaching session by her father’s new wife, Chloé, unaware that the lesson has been cancelled, Lycke is left standing alone outside the courts.
It’s a cold, wet late-May evening.
By the time mother Helena arrives two hours later to collect her daughter, Lycke is gone.
Initially, Stockholm’s police are reluctant to accept the situation as anything more than a disgruntled child having run away from an unhappy existence juggled between two combative households. Time that could be spent searching is frittered away, with few officers assigned to the case and even fewer approaching it seriously.
Reliving the agony of her parallel experience, Ellen steps in, channelling her professional research skills and intuition into the most important investigative story of her high-profile career.
Suspicion ricochets back and forth between Lycke’s estranged parents, emotionally distant stepmother and cocky tennis coach, Petter, a young man whose sexually threatening behaviour unnerves Ellen when he agrees to be interviewed.
As Ellen scrambles in desperation to analyse the dysfunctional Höök dynamic, searching for the slightest clue to Lycke’s whereabouts, her probing reveals a lonely, socially awkward introvert taunted by her schoolmates, neglected by Helena and Harald and resented by Chloé.
Her one friend and confidant is her nanny, Mona, a woman whose entire working life has been devoted to raising other people’s children but who is now within days of retiring from service. With time running out, will Mona’s final week as Lycke’s caregiver end in happiness or grief?

The Woman in Cabin 10

22/9/2017

Ruth Ware: Vintage $19.99

IT HAS the makings of an extraordinary, all-expenses-paid, first-class indulgence: a five-day northern lights cruise to the Arctic tip of Norway aboard a lavishly appointed vessel so exclusive it carries no more than a dozen handpicked passengers.
Not surprisingly, British travel writer Lauren ‘Lo’ Blacklock is acutely conscious of her privileged status alongside fellow journalists, photographers and potential investors invited to join the maiden voyage.
At the same time, her enthusiasm is overshadowed by the echoes of a violent burglary at her flat in London only days before her scheduled departure that has left Lo with bruises on her face and a case of crippling insomnia. Her preparation is dampened even further by an ill-timed argument with her boyfriend and the temptation to self-medicate with alcohol.
It’s an unfortunate lead-up to what Lo has been hoping will become her big career break: the chance to finally show off her professional capabilities.
Surely such luxurious surrounds will be the healing balm that’s needed to help Lo conquer her nightmares and refocus – or so she thinks.
Within hours of boarding the tiny ship, however, Lo finds herself fearing for her safety all over again.
Jolted out of her boozy, sleepless, post-midnight daze by a human scream, she staggers to the railing of her cabin balcony to glimpse a female body slipping beneath the surface of the near-freezing ocean.
When her attempt to alert the ship’s security chief is brushed off, Lo begins to suspect that something truly sinister is occurring.
Is there a murderer lurking somewhere on board – one of the VIPs with whom she has already shared a dinner table, perhaps, or a member of the beautifully mannered but timid crew? Or did the mysterious ‘dead’ woman never exist at all, as an increasing number of people around Lo now insist?

The Killing Bay

1/9/2017

Chris Ould: Titan Books £7.99

IT’S not every day that a novel set in one of the world’s least-known archipelagos, the Faroe Islands, appears in print. Even rarer is a book that delivers both a spine-tingling plot and at the same time an insightful, informative and entertaining glimpse into the psyche of the Faroese population.
Faroes-born, British-raised policeman Jan Reyna is back in the islands for the funeral of his biological father, a man with whom Reyna has had no contact since his mother died, leaving her five-year-old son to be raised by her sister in England.
At the same time the Faroese are celebrating the start of the traditional whaling season – a time when pods are driven onto beaches to be butchered and then shared by the community. This centuries-old but gory act of self-sufficiency has caught the attention of an international animal rights group that is determined to disrupt the practice in any way it can.
When the anti-whaling protesters’ photographer, Erla Sivertsen, is found murdered, the culprit is soon identified as a local fishing-boat captain and the victim’s former boyfriend, now a married man who rekindled his relationship with Sivertsen when she returned to document the hunt and for the past few weeks has been involved with her in a clandestine affair.
It’s an open-and-shut case, according to the local law enforcement branch’s second-in-command, based in Tórshavn, the Faroes’ capital and only town of any real size.
Police detective Hjalti Hentze isn’t quite so certain, however, despite being the adulterous fisherman’s father-in-law, and enlists Reyna’s help to explore other possibilities. Inadvertently the pair opens a door on subterfuge, espionage and covert intelligence that stretches far beyond the Faroes’ own watery border.
Ould describes the landscape, culture and lifestyle of the Faroe Islands to perfection, delivering a portrait of an impressively independent society that takes care of itself when threatened.

The Ice Lands

7/4/2017

Steinar Bragi: Macmillan $29.99

IT HAS all the makings of a leisurely couple of weeks of sightseeing by day and sipping wine around a campfire at dusk – either that or a tension-filled nightmare in which four 30-somethings snap and snarl at each other as the ceaseless forced proximity sets tempers alight.
When two couples – Hrafn and Vigdís, and Egill and Anna – set out from Reykjavík for a driving adventure through the Icelandic highlands, each is looking forward to spending time with his or her partner and friends but is also already nursing their own highly personal and unsettling concerns.
The GFC has left their country crippled, due in no small part to the short-sighted, self-serving actions of lawyers like Egill and futures-trading businessmen like Hrafn – two greedily ambitious young men with a love of living an adrenaline- and drug-fuelled life on the edge.
Although outwardly more settled, their girlfriends – psychologist Vigdís and journalist Anna – are also deeply troubled, not least of all by doubts about their current relationships.
Week one of the journey has passed relatively smoothly, but as the foursome presses on late one night, hungry, exhausted and desperately seeking shelter from a ferocious volcanic sandstorm, their luck expires. Suddenly, with visibility close to zero, their vehicle strikes something immense.
Stranded in an unmapped, supposedly uninhabited wasteland, the group begins to experience a series of increasingly bizarre scenarios.
How can a farming couple in the middle of nowhere eke out an existence without livestock? Why are two supposedly wild Arctic foxes lurking alarmingly close to a homestead?
As resentment and distrust escalate, can the four city-dwellers find a way of escaping what has become a truly terrifying rural ordeal?
Author Steinar Bragi seamlessly blends reality and paranoia, actuality and imagination to create a novel that has been described to perfection as Iceland’s Twin Peaks.

Why Did You Lie?

13/1/2017

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir: Hachette Australia $32.99

IT IS deep winter in Iceland: a bleak, gloomy season when the region’s few hours of daylight are marred by unpredictable blizzards, roaring Arctic gales and impenetrable, all-enveloping fog.
Over the course of roughly a week in late January, in the south-west of the country a series of unexplained, grisly events unfolds.
Nói and Vala arrive home with son Tumi from a holiday in Florida to find the Americans with whom they’ve swapped houses have moved on from Reykjavík seemingly in a hurry and without leaving the family’s spare set of door keys behind.
Nína, a policewoman ostracised for daring to complain about a fellow officer, is punished by her superiors by being assigned a dreary, dirty administrative job in the station’s basement. At the same time, she is grieving the inevitable loss of her husband, investigative journalist Thröstur, who is lying brain-dead in hospital. Only a couple of weeks earlier Nína discovered Thröstur hanging from a beam in the couple’s garage.
Introverted photographer Helgi has been invited to accompany a work party winched in by helicopter to a lighthouse on the largest of the famous ‘Three Stacks’, a set of exposed sheer rock pillars jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean. His temporary companions, Heida, Ívar and Tóti, are abrupt and unwelcoming.
When deteriorating weather leaves them marooned on a surface area barely big enough to support a single-room structure, the four strangers become suspicious, distrusting, even paranoid. As they remain forced together with literally nowhere to go, dangerous tensions arise.
In the midst of it all are bodies: bodies floating, bodies dangling, bodies unaccounted for.
Adding to the confusion are cryptic messages, printed or scrawled, alleging some form of dishonesty.
Do these three apparently unrelated storylines somehow intersect? What could possibly link them – other than the shame of a long-shared lie?

The Ice Beneath Her

9/12/2016

Camilla Grebe: Allen & Unwin $39.99

STOCKHOLM'S crisp mid-winter perfection has been shattered, its pristine snowscape disfigured by a geyser of human blood. In an exclusive outer suburb of the city a woman has been murdered, her body crumpled in a hallway, the head propped upright and staring vacantly towards the millionaire homeowner’s front door.
The building’s only known occupant, Jesper Orre, is missing. The playboy CEO of Scandinavia’s fastest-growing clothing chain, Orre has vanished, presumed to have fled the scene of his crime.
Peter is one of the first police officers deployed to attend, a detective desensitised by constant exposure to the gruesome realities of homicide. His focus is all-consuming – a convenient distraction from the bitterness of a failed marriage and a lack of interest in his teenaged son.
In actual fact it’s Orre’s second disappearance in as many months, although only one person knows of his previous desertion. Wearing an impressive diamond ring on one finger, Emma has been waiting for Orre to share a glass or two of wine with her while toasting their yet-to-be-publicised engagement. He’s never missed so much as a phonecall, let alone his own celebratory dinner; his fiancée is distraught.
At the age of 59, behavioural scientist Hanne is also harbouring a personal secret: the humiliating signs of early-onset dementia. Recruited to assist investigators again after a 10-year hiatus, she uses her newly resurrected career as rebellion against a psychologically undermining husband.
A decade earlier, Hanne – at that stage drafted in as a police consultant for the first time – and Peter worked on another case together: a case with eerie similarities to the current one at Orre’s house. Then, professional collaboration morphed into a disastrous affair that sapped her self-confidence.
Narrated in rotation by Peter, Emma and Hanne, this thriller pivots on chilling parallel existences, unnerving delusions, festering resentment and lifelong regrets.

<<Previous

' Books are treasure for the spirit and the soul. '

— VB 2020

Book reviews

WABONGA Press produces an original book review every Friday. Books are chosen from among the latest English-language fiction and non-fiction releases in Australia and internationally.
Each 300-word review is accompanied by a high-resolution cover image.
All are available for licensing to print media in selected regions.For less than the cost of one takeaway cup of coffee each week, a publication can make use of this service to access a new review every seven days, backed by a written guarantee that the same content will not be licensed for use by any direct competitor.
Please contact Wabonga's publisher, Rosalea Ryan, to discuss how this service can be tailored to your newspaper or magazine.