Echoes From the Dead

"This one is so interesting. I judged the International Daggers this year and he was highly commended. It’s his first novel and it’s set on Øland, an island in the Baltic off Sweden. Many years ago a small boy disappeared. He just climbed over his parents’ garden wall and went into the fog. No, in the novel. And his mother has fallen apart and his grandfather is in residential care. He’s really, really good on ageing – on losing the ability to make the body do what it should. Anyway, the grandfather has the child’s shoe sent to him in the post. It’s a really good novel. It’s a first novel, you know, so it could have been tightened up a bit but he’s very good on the sense of place and the industry that used to be there but is gone. Quarrying and the ships that once came in but don’t anymore. Absolutely. They are all rural too and there is a sense of the landscape that can be hostile."