UNDER THE STORM

The murder of a young woman in rural Sweden has wrenching, far-reaching consequences for the policeman investigating the crime and the nephew of the man convicted of it.

Seven-year-old Isak Nyqvist has a warm relationship with his mother’s 25-year-old brother, Edvard Christensson, his regular Sunday companion. But for residents of tiny Marbäck, Edvard is a bad sort who’s cut from the same cloth as his father, “a troublemaking bastard who no one liked.” So no one except the devastated Isak is all that surprised when Edvard is arrested for killing his girlfriend, Lovisa, who died of blunt force trauma to the head before her body was left in a raging house fire. Nor are locals surprised when Isak, cursed by the same bloodlines, becomes a social misfit himself by his teens. The one person who remains unsure of Edvard’s guilt is police detective Vidar Jörgensson, who’s unable to let go of the case even after his decades-long obsession with it leads to his getting pushed off the force and his once-loving marriage runs into trouble. (Vidar’s fraught relationship with his own father, a corrupt cop, was the basis for Carlsson’s great Blaze Me a Sun, from 2023.) In the end, the smallest, most slowly emerging details provide answers to the mystery. Boasting the psychological intensity of a Hitchcock film and gloomy atmospheric elements including a ferocious storm, this is a gripping, utterly distinctive mystery by a newly established Swedish master. As in Blaze Me a Sun, Carlsson explores the nature of grief and generational trauma, all while keeping readers unsure of what’s going to happen next.

A brilliantly woven, unsettling crime novel.