Product Description

Innocence will be sacrificed... On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies ritually mutilated and defiled – and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall. Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the small town she’d left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm tax lawyer, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the church of the cult he helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor, and to confront the rumours circulating in a closed and frightened community. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark and impossible to guess...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128745 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk
The days when crime in translation was regarded as some kind of exotic hothouse flower are long gone – nowadays, a book like Asa Larsson’s The Savage Altar will be eagerly picked up by those seeking something out of the ordinary in the crime field. The reasons are twofold: the promise of an unusual setting (here, a vividly realised Sweden) and writing of more style and elegance than can be found in much native product (not always the case, of course, as a novel in translation is only as good as the skill with which its translator renders it into English).

Asa Larsson’s compelling novel features a strongly drawn protagonist who is to feature in a projected series: corporate lawyer Rebecka Martinsson, reluctantly enlisted by her friend Sanna, who is under suspicion regarding the grisly death of a famous writer of religious books, Viktor Strandgård; the latter has had both hands and eyes removed in a bloody killing in a church in Northern Sweden. Also involved in the subsequent investigation is canny police inspector Anna-Maria Mella, dragooned into the case by a colleague, despite being incapacitated by her advanced state of pregnancy. Like Lynda la Plante’s Jane Tennison, these are women who are struggling in a world of unsympathetic men (and Larsson peoples her cast with some extremely nasty males), but Larsson’s writing is more ambitious than her British colleague, with a level of plotting that excels in both ambition and achievement. It will be interesting to see what the author cooks up for her beleaguered heroine in future books. --Barry Forshaw

Review
'Nail-biting ... A suspense-filled mystery by yet another talented Swedish writer' Sunday Telegraph 'A labyrinthine conspiracy, superlative storytelling' Independent

Independent
A labyrinthine conspiracy, superlative storytelling

Customer Reviews

Thoughtful Scandinavian chiller. Scary on a human scale
Scandinavian crime fiction has really taken off in recent years and it's wonderful that books like Savage Altar (previously published as Sun Storm) are being translated and brought to a world-wide audience. The genre as a whole specialises in claustrophobic, small-scale mysteries, often made all the more chilling because they involve relatively few people in isolated areas where either the sun don't shine or - possibly worse - the days never dim...

Savage Altar introduces Rebecka Martinsson, a young city lawyer who is dragged back to confront the ghosts of her emotional past in her rural home town when an ex-boyfriend (of sorts) is brutally murdered. Rebecka is a fragile achiever; clever but compelled to work far too hard to make up for her insecurity. She over-reacts to a friendly approach from her boss with spiky ferocity, and many of her relationships feature awkward conversations and painful silences, where old arguments and grudges confuse the protagonists.
We also meet an interesting detective, who happens to be eight months pregnant and desperately trying to go on maternity leave; Rebecka's spiritual grandfather (who is called Sivving - and there's a great joke attached to that name), the murdered man's sister (who is both not what she seems and exactly what she seems), a sinister evangelical church and its collection of overenthusiastic pastors, plus the usual pushy bureaucrat who wants the whole murder case wrapped up in no time flat.
Where Savage Altar stands head and shoulders above run of the mill thrillers is in the very human scale of the mystery and the past events which have interwoven to culminate in the death of one young man - and a very real threat to his sister (who looks like the prime suspect) and to Rebecka. Savage Altar is littered with beautifully observed interactions; often the most touching are between humans and animals where affection can be more easily expressed than with other real live people...

Savage Altar is easy to read, well plotted and beautifully described. I romped through it in a couple of days, eager to find out whodunnit (and why), but also eager to spend time with the protagonists in a starkly beautiful, dangerous landscape. If your tastes run to American-style serial-killer or police procedural thrillers then Savage Altar may not be to your taste, however; much of the menace is implied rather than related, blow by bloody blow.
I can also recommend the follow up, Blood Spilt, although you do need to read them in order to enjoy them fully. I will be looking out for more thrillers from Asa Larsson; these aren't perfect but they are more than good enough to drag me back for more.
8/10

The Savage Altar / Sun Storm
I am the translator of this book, and completely agree that the new title is very misleading. This is entirely down to the British publisher; there was no consultation with me, and I didn't even know the book was being published in the UK until somebody saw it in a bookshop and told me. Åsa's second book, The Blood Spilt, will be out here later this year - with the same title, I'm pleased to say! - and The Black Path is due out in the USA before too long.
Glad you enjoyed the story - I think she's a really good writer, and a joy to translate.

[......]
This book, Savage Alter, was previously published as Sun Storm. Beware! Amazon, as usual, fails to point this out. Do they have any checks in place for duplicate/alternative publishers/editions? I suspect not. However, if you have yet to read it - under either guise - I recommend it. It's an excellent, well written crime novel; lyrically descriptive, it captures the brooding essence of rural, northern Sweden in winter. I live there, so take my word for it.