crimes against humanity
Nightmares – general and specific
Hmmm, I’ve been rather troubled by vivid nightmares myself lately so when I saw
The Nightmare by Lars Kepler among the second-hand books in a stately home a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it a whirl. It’s 500 pages long, so I needed a good incentive to tackle it. But the main reason that I bought and then persisted with it was that I’d been impressed by The Mirror Man by the same husband-and-wife team (written ten years later) as I mentioned in my review last week. Would this one live up to expectation, I wonder?
A young woman’s body is discovered aboard a boat drifting in a bay south of Stockholm. Her lungs are full of brackish water but her clothes are completely dry. Then a General Director of a Swedish Arms Committee is found hanging in his own apartment in a scenario that looks like suicide. Detective Inspector Joona Linna suspects the two incidents are connected in some sinister way, but even he is unprepared for the professional killing spree which follows, and the intricacy of the events which lie behind this. It’s a tale of corruption in high places, of blackmail and betrayal, of illegal arms deals and smuggling, of security policies and embargoes, of treason, violations of international law, crimes against humanity.
Short chapters make it easy reading, but I confess this one really didn’t appeal to me. It wasn’t so much the rather annoying aspects (frequent statements as to what characters are thinking; repetition of background facts; improbable aspects to the solving of the case; some stiltedness from translation) as that I didn’t care enough for the characters, and found the theme of high level greed and unscrupulous backstabbing somewhat tedious. In my opinion it’d be more pacey and engaging if it were reduced to half the length. Sorry. But it’s a salutary reminder that authors can’t expect readers to like all their books equally.
Oh, and these fictional nightmares make mine so inconsequential as to be not worth a mention. In my case I just need some chill-out time!!