If you can't think of anything good to say, say nothing.

Three hours later....

That didn't last long, I have to say something. I gather this is a first novel, maybe it's also her worst. I felt like the characters were largely names with adjectives added to them. None of them felt real or fleshed out. It has the virtue of being short, but despite that I'm afraid I skimmed the last third, having lost patience with it by then. I would have made a bad Sámi. ( )

If you can't think of anything good to say, say nothing.

Three hours later....

That didn't last long, I have to say something. I gather this is a first novel, maybe it's also her worst. I felt like the characters were largely names with adjectives added to them. None of them felt real or fleshed out. It has the virtue of being short, but despite that I'm afraid I skimmed the last third, having lost patience with it by then. I would have made a bad Sámi. ( )

If you can't think of anything good to say, say nothing.

Three hours later....

That didn't last long, I have to say something. I gather this is a first novel, maybe it's also her worst. I felt like the characters were largely names with adjectives added to them. None of them felt real or fleshed out. It has the virtue of being short, but despite that I'm afraid I skimmed the last third, having lost patience with it by then. I would have made a bad Sámi. ( )

I love it when someone calls a book "moody." It's even better when I agree with them.
There are tensions in an isolated village near the Lapland border where everyone knows your name, wants your secrets, and suffers together through a winter that is "5,064 hours long" (p 4). Even Police Constable Torsson has an attitude when he learns he has to travel 25 miles over the ice and snow to investigate the death of a young teacher. When a man is found frozen to death in a snowbank and the entire community won't talk about the details, for all appearances it looks like an accident. This much is true - after getting into a fight after a mah-jongg game Matti Olsen collapsed and died of exposure. Case closed. Or is it? A friend of Matti's arrives the next summer and convinces Torsson it isn't really over; the case deserves a second look. Is it connected to a woman with a piece of bloody rope in a backpack?
For most of the story it bounces from perspective to perspective as different characters share what they want you to know. Most effectively, Ekman reserves the first person narrative for the murderer's detailed confession. ( )

It is a short book and it took me a long time to get into it. I found it so unengaging I was reading only a few pages before I fell asleep. the initial part o the plot is peculiarly like the Year of the Hare, except that tis takes off into some male bonding fantasy instead of the animalisation of the man. the plot then becomes simply implausible (artist pal of dead artist enlisted informally to help 'tec solve cold case in remote Sami community). I didn't become interested again for about 100 pages, by which time it's all over. But in the end I just thought all those involved were idiots, including the two (it turns out) 'tragic' suicides. Agatha Christie could probably have dunitbetter, it's at that level. I was taken in by the blurb and the cover pic, but don't look to Ekman for profound Nordic Wisdom (actually, Norman would really have livened this up!) ( )