Echoes From the Dead

Name: Echoes From the Dead
Author: Johan Theorin
ISBN: 1407036793

by Johan Theorin

'An impressive debut novel' The Times 'Fantastic' Guardian Can you ever come to terms with a missing child? Julia Davidsson has not. Her five-year-old son disappeared twenty years previously on the Swedish island of Oland. No trace of him has ever been found. Until his shoe arrives in the post. It has been sent to Julia's father, a retired sea-captain still living on the island. Soon he and Julia are piecing together fragments of the past: fragments that point inexorably to a local man called Nils Kant, known to delight in the pain of others. But Nils Kant died during the 1960s. So who is the stranger seen wandering across the fields as darkness falls? It soon becomes clear that someone wants to stop Julia's search for the truth. And that he's much, much closer than she thinks . . .

Recommended by

Ann Cleeves

"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."

The Best Nordic Crime Novels · fivebooks.com