Product Description

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 ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1808 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
'Evocative and haunting, with a subtle sense of menace that grows with each page. An outstandingly original thriller'
--Simon Beckett, author of THE CHEMISTRY OF DEATH

Review
'Theorin brilliantly infuses his secluded locale with menace - and acute social commentary.'

Review
'Fascinating storyline, authentic characters and accomplished writing make this a top read.'

Customer Reviews

1st rate and will leave you guessing!
Another great scandinavian writer. Very descriptive of area and very good plot.
A boy goes missing and 20 years later his shoe turns up in the post! This is a very gripping read. Keeps leading you to think you have solved it and then you have to think again! I didn't figure it out until the very last moment.
Would recommend this to anyone that likes crime or mystery novels. Will certainly be looking out for next book and getting people to read this.

New Swedish writer
Johan Theorin is a Swedish journalist and this is his first novel. It is planned as the first in a quartet of crime novels set on the island of Oland.
The plot concerns a lost child missing on the island for over twenty years. Julia, the child's mother, arrives back home at her father's behest and so the story begins.
The story is narrated in the present with flashbacks to various times past. My main gripe with the book is the way these flashbacks are randomly included in some chapters, I think it would have been better to insert them as chapters in their own right.
The book is also too long with some repetition, though to be fair not as long as many crime novels. It does give one time to dwell on some of the more implausible aspects of the plot. How come one elderly character did not know the name of the village his lifelong friend came from, and this on a small island?
Overall, the plot is interesting with plausible characters and the atmosphere is suitably gloomy. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the series, The Darkest Room.

Another great Scandinavian crime writer
I am a huge fan of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Kirsten Eknan et al, and following a trip to the Swedish island of Gotland last year was very keen to read this book set on the island of Oland. I found it absolutely gripping and highly evocative of a Swedish island out of season, beautiful yet windswept and empty. The story moved from past to present quite seamlessly, and the relationship between the daughter whose son disappeared and her father was very well depicted. One scene in the book is so creepy I had to wait for daylight to read it! I recommended it to a friend who has just gone to work in Sweden, and he devoured it in a train journey from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and tells me that the next book is even better. A writer to watch.