Sun And Shadow
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the three-time winner of the Swedish Crime Writers' Award.
A couple are found murdered in their flat in Gothenburg, their bodies symbolically arranged in a mysterious and grotesque fashion. As Winter follows the trail of clues into the cult world of the gothic, he becomes enmeshed in a riddle of nightmares, where he must untangle good from evil and sun from shadow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cars from Sweden are known for being dependable and safe, but like this American debut from a celebrated Scandinavian crime writer, their stolid lines don't necessarily spark excitement. Erik Winter, a jazz-loving, gourmet-cooking detective, is a blaze of color amid the drab postwar apartment blocks of Gothenburg, a city reeling from a macabre double murder. Winter, whose normally secure battlements are assaulted by family tragedy and the impending birth of his first child, sets out to follow the dark drops of gore blooming in the snow. The path leads in any number of interesting directions through thickets of death metal enthusiasts and swingers, through winds of psychosexual trauma but these subjects never pierce the book's colorless atmosphere. Excessive exposition slows down an already unhurried plot, which Americans fond of glib investigators on CSI and Hannibal Lecter's piercing irony will find insufficiently suspenseful. The villain is comparatively bland, and the translation often awkward: Winters takes a "softly softly approach" so that his witness doesn't get "chary." Add in an insistence on mundane details, such as the particulars of a simple bank transaction, and the results smother any flame of personality. All the blocks that built this gothic ice cathedral are cut straight, but assembled without the design of a compelling thriller.
