This is a tale that reunites the reader with Patrik Hedstrom and Erica Falck, although Erica, by this stage heavily pregnant, assumes a much less prominent role than she did first time around. The setting is once again Fjallbacka, what in normal circumstances should be a somnambulant town. Situated about 150 km from Gothenburg, in 2010 it had a population of 859.
The climate in the second series has switched from the chilly atmosphere of the Ice Princess to a very hot summer. Maybe men of god need that fiery heat to inflame their hellfire and brimstone passion, and with a book titled The Preacher, the scorching weather creates the ambience of the furnace.
Because the detective and his partner are nervously anticipating the birth of their first child, Patrik is at home with the mother to be. At the same time and not too far away, life’s cycle is working itself out. As birth is about begin a life, murder is busy taking it away. A child out playing has the misadventure of finding the body of a young woman, Tanja, at Kings Cleft in the back of Swedish beyond.
When Patrik, wrenched from his home and the aura of new life expectancy, reaches the scene he quickly discovers that unlike at home death is now in the ascendancy. The bodies of two teenage campers, Siv Lantin and Mona Thernblad, who had not been seen since the late 1970s, lie beneath the corpse of the latest victim, Tanja, whose disappearance had been reported a week earlier by a friend. An autopsy on the two teens reveals evidence of torture. On Tanja's body there were semen deposits. As the suspected kidnapper of the missing couple had taken his own life twenty years earlier, the cops are presented with a conundrum.
As is sometimes the case with Scandinoir, a close eye has to be kept on the characters otherwise the reader risks losing track of who is who. This labour could be avoided if less attention was given by authors to the home life of the central character. It is what made The Arc Of The Swallow a good read rather than a great read. Immersion in family is where potentially good novels can have the pace ripped out of them to the point where they are pulled into a chicane and their speed reduced to pedestrian.
Patrik and Erica live close to the sea and that leads to extended family members inviting themselves to stay free - avoiding the normal charges were they to book a hotel room. This introduces its own tensions but is not crucial to the unfolding murder narrative. Nor are readers presumably interested in the side shows of the customary family strains. Fortunately here, Lackberg managed through a range of interesting characters to keep the plot moving. The ongoing marital difficulties faced by her sister Anna and carried over from Ice Princess have at their heart two characters sufficiently interesting to halt a downward spiral into ennui.
As it works out, Tanja was not a local woman, but a German who was in Sweden to carry our some research into the disappearance of the couple, above whose corpses she had been unceremoniously dumped.
Of course matters are not helped by the casual approach to investigation that has characterised the Swedish police of crime fiction. There remain the usual office tensions fed by the ego of superiors who really do believe they are superior in matters other than rank.
The Hult family come onto the investigation's radar. No surprise - the late son of the late Preacher had long been suspected of having kidnapped the campers. Additionally, his grandson was the last person to to see Tanja alive. It becomes clear to Patrik that the solving of these killings will take the investigation there.
Ephraim Hult, the Preacher and faith healer, is long since dead but not so his legacy. The family is made up of hoods and religious whackjobs, while split down the middle in a typical class divide. As the investigation progresses another young girl goes missing causing it to be ramped up in what might be a race against time. If time succeeds so too does torture, rape and certain death for the missing girl.
Dysfunctional families, religious nutters, serial murders, Lackberg mixed her ingredients well and served up a tantalising mystery.
Dysfunctional families, religious nutters, serial murders, Lackberg mixed her ingredients well and served up a tantalising mystery.
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