sacrificial love
Nordic Noir
Tove Alsterdal is one of Sweden’s most highly acclaimed suspense writers. Her novel We Know You Remember was named Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year in 2020 and was awarded the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel in 2021. Time then, that I read it.
The setting is a remote landscape in Sweden that is both expansive and melancholy. It provides a strong atmosphere of mystery and darkness against which murder, rape and unsolved cases take on sinister and suspicious dimensions, which Alsterdal uses to great effect.
When Olof Hagström (now 37) returns to the house where he grew up he makes a gruesome discovery: his father Sven dead in the shower, the water still running, a single gash across the top of his abdomen severing an artery. Olof is in the process of leaving the scene, when a neighbour appears and contacts the police.
He’s instantly apprehended … because Olof has history. When he was only 14, after days of questioning, he had confessed to the rape and murder of Lina Stavred. The girl was 16. She’d been strangled with a branch and her body thrown into the river, they said. But no body was ever recovered. No conviction. No trial. His name never published. The lad was a minor. He was sent away. But everybody knew.
And ‘everybody’ included Eira Sjödin (aged 32) who grew up in this remote place. She’s now a police officer, combining a demanding job with caring for her mother Kerstin, who has advancing dementia. She’s called in on the case of the dead man in the shower, and memories come flooding back, memories from 23 years before … when she was only nine herself.
Olof is soon released by the police with cast iron alibis to support his innocence of his father’s death, but that doesn’t stop malicious gossip spreading about his past. And even when the real culprit is apprehended, the ill-feeling against him persists.
The nearest neighbours are Tryggve and Marianne Nydalen. Their son Patrik, and his wife Sofi, are staying with them within sight of Sven’s house. City-girl Sofi is afraid of the forest, the presence of evil she senses, but she makes herself walk through it every day to swim down by the secret beach in 17 degree water. And that’s when she sees a curtain flutter in the old man’s house … a light inside … a shadow … a movement … darkness filling the whole window. Something has to be done. She has children; they can’t have a rapist/murderer living next door. ‘Why should a person like that be allowed to move freely and not me?’
Years ago, her father-in-law, Tryggve Nydalen, was one of seven youths who gang raped a girl, served a year in prison, then changed his name. Was he also responsible for the murder of Sven a generation later – silencing him? The police haul him in for questioning.
Then Sven’s house (Olof’s childhood home) is attacked with stones and bottles, burned to the ground during a lightning storm. Olof himself, alone in the house at the time with his father’s dog, is found buried in the wood, still alive but severely injured and unconscious. The boys responsible for the arson are adamant they hadn’t chased him into the forest.
The current and historic murders become inextricably interwoven as parallel lines of enquiry get underway. When a body is found in the water, speculation is rife. Could this be that of Lina, the teenage girl who vanished 23 years ago? It’s certainly the body of someone who met a brutal end. The forensic teams start searching, artefacts emerge, fingers start pointing away from Olof, towards people Eira knew well in her youth. Back towards a time when she was a young girl hearing the whispers, aware of the tensions, but kept in the dark. Now she’s discovering far more about her friends and relatives than she ever bargained for, and suddenly clearing the name of the 14-year-old Olof holds unnamed threats and horrors.
But her local knowledge is invaluable. She sees things no one else even thought of. She must juggle the emerging facts with a conflict of interest she initially dare not share with her superiors. As a police officer she must stand up for truth; as a relative she isn’t obliged to give evidence and can protect those closest to her.
In the end it’s a thread on social media that leads her to the truth of what really happened all those years ago. A speech pattern. Words spoken unthinkingly, incriminating unknowingly.
It’s a cleverly plotted, well-written fiction, loosely woven from real-life cases, a compelling tale of miscarriages of justice, revenge, and sacrificial love. Well deserving the accolades and awards.