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This Land is No Stranger: A Nordic Thriller
With a career that is spiraling out of control and a nasty drug habit that has taken her to rock bottom, NYC detective Veronika Brand is looking for a way out. When a call from Sweden interrupts her personal chaos, the foreign tongue of her distant Swedish relatives pulls her across the Atlantic with the lure of adventure and escape. But what she finds is far from the idyllic picture her grandmother painted. Instead of long languid summers basking in the midnight sun, she unearths secrets long since buried in the frozen ground.
In Krister Hammar, a local Sami land rights lawyer, she thinks she has found a kindred spirit. But when they stumble upon a brutal murder scene in a manor house owned by the rivals of her family, she starts questioning his truth. She finds herself being moved like a chess piece between the desolate region of Härjedalen in the north and the steely-cold streets of Stockholm, scrambling to find the links between her family history, a trail of missing Roma girls, and a series of vicious murders. In unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the law, Veronika has her sights set only on the beast that preys on the wicked. Will she be able to see past the lure of the northern lights to the dark secrets that threaten to destroy her?
With a spin on traditional Nordic noir and Scanoir genres, this murder mystery thriller follows female protagonist and disgraced NYC cop Veronika Brand as she escapes her homegrown problems only to find herself in unfamiliar territory in the home of her ancestors, Sweden.
The hallmarks of Swedish suspense fiction made popular by Henning Mankell, Camilla Läckberg, and Stieg Larsson are cleverly combined with new crime fiction that explores social, cultural, and economic power, both from historical and modern perspectives. Sweden, Swedish culture and Nordic identity are explored in this cleverly written suspense drama that keeps the reader guessing right to the very end.
This new approach to Swedish suspense fiction breaks from traditional approaches by showing the cultural context through the eyes of a protagonist who is a non-native. The topics and themes explored in this book go beyond crime fiction, putting This Land Is No Stranger on track to be one of the best books of 2021.
In Krister Hammar, a local Sami land rights lawyer, she thinks she has found a kindred spirit. But when they stumble upon a brutal murder scene in a manor house owned by the rivals of her family, she starts questioning his truth. She finds herself being moved like a chess piece between the desolate region of Härjedalen in the north and the steely-cold streets of Stockholm, scrambling to find the links between her family history, a trail of missing Roma girls, and a series of vicious murders. In unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the law, Veronika has her sights set only on the beast that preys on the wicked. Will she be able to see past the lure of the northern lights to the dark secrets that threaten to destroy her?
With a spin on traditional Nordic noir and Scanoir genres, this murder mystery thriller follows female protagonist and disgraced NYC cop Veronika Brand as she escapes her homegrown problems only to find herself in unfamiliar territory in the home of her ancestors, Sweden.
The hallmarks of Swedish suspense fiction made popular by Henning Mankell, Camilla Läckberg, and Stieg Larsson are cleverly combined with new crime fiction that explores social, cultural, and economic power, both from historical and modern perspectives. Sweden, Swedish culture and Nordic identity are explored in this cleverly written suspense drama that keeps the reader guessing right to the very end.
This new approach to Swedish suspense fiction breaks from traditional approaches by showing the cultural context through the eyes of a protagonist who is a non-native. The topics and themes explored in this book go beyond crime fiction, putting This Land Is No Stranger on track to be one of the best books of 2021.
306 pages, Hardcover
Published March 11, 2021
2 people want to read
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August 23, 2021
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner told us in “Requiem for a Nun,” “it’s not even past.” Modern fiction and film are rife with reminders of that fact, the most recent being a smart, tight, suspenseful package of Nordic noir, a study in improbable family ties and a demand for vengeance that spans miles and generations. In “This Land Is No Stranger,” authors Sarah Hollister and Gil Reavill invest the classic fish-out-of-water story with modern twists, geopolitical intrigues, and old scores to be settled. There will be blood, indeed.
Suspended NYPD detective Veronika Brand, grappling with a monster of an addiction to Adderall, takes a first-time flight to Sweden, her ancestral home -- a response to Brand getting an out-of-nowhere phone call summoning her to celebrate her great aunt’s 95th birthday. It’s a call that conceals the need for her presence to help in righting a host of past wrongs, from a modern human trafficking concern to a deadly World War II-era arson case. It’s a calling that gets personal when said great aunt dies under circumstances as strange and sudden as the phone call itself.
It’s the classic call-to-adventure of solid storytelling: protagonist pulled into a situation beyond her ken and forced to fight her way into the light. But Brand’s experience is one of someone with no way back to her old life. “Right now,” she says at one point, “I’m without a country.”
The American detective learns her possible purpose there, to “perform an exorcism on the past,” but the how of solving that known unknown is her challenge. She’s assisted by Krister Hammar, a land rights attorney with a detective’s curiosity and a reputation for asking the wrong questions. Their relationship makes the obligatory evolution from strangers to genial adversaries to friends, as they encounter numerous murders and undertake their own road trip to find those responsible.
Periodically, “Stranger” strains under the weight of its own expansive ambitions. We’re witness to a world of wayward Romani children, Swedish police officials, and faded industrial titans, among others. There’s such a big cast of characters, it gets difficult to track who’s who and how the various ancillaries link to the bigger story.
“Stranger” is sometimes hampered by an inconsistent authorial voice (perhaps to be expected as the product of two American authors writing for a Swedish publisher). Certain passages ascribed to an American – Brand – don’t ring idiomatically real. There’s a relative absence of the contractions that are, among other things, intelligently informal. “Cannot” and “was not,” for example, stand in for “can’t” and “wasn’t” in conversations where the informal would be more likely, given the context. Other conversational exchanges – one in particular, between Brand and another detective -- just aren’t believable as speech between law-enforcement professionals, reading like the language of a forensics textbook.
And at times, scenic-route atmospherics interrupt the forward thrust of the story; we’re led down culs-de-sac of historical exposition that take us nowhere, or at least nowhere that furthers our grasp of the story.
That story, at its core, is a strong one. Brand weathers numerous dangerous encounters en route to disquieting revelations about herself and her family history, revelations uncovered, artichoke-like, one layer at a time. By the end -- when justice is delivered and yes, revenge is served as cold as Sweden in February – Brand is a protagonist we care about.
In the early going, it might seem that Hollister and Reavill violate a prime directive of storytelling: Give a protagonist a bias for action, don’t keep that character forever at the mercy of events. But ultimately in this novel, there’s a deft balance at work -- Brand is both at the mercy of events and taking charge when she can to navigate through them – that resonates as real, uplifting and satisfyingly human. Maybe enough to make Veronika Brand a brand, and the linchpin for another book.
Suspended NYPD detective Veronika Brand, grappling with a monster of an addiction to Adderall, takes a first-time flight to Sweden, her ancestral home -- a response to Brand getting an out-of-nowhere phone call summoning her to celebrate her great aunt’s 95th birthday. It’s a call that conceals the need for her presence to help in righting a host of past wrongs, from a modern human trafficking concern to a deadly World War II-era arson case. It’s a calling that gets personal when said great aunt dies under circumstances as strange and sudden as the phone call itself.
It’s the classic call-to-adventure of solid storytelling: protagonist pulled into a situation beyond her ken and forced to fight her way into the light. But Brand’s experience is one of someone with no way back to her old life. “Right now,” she says at one point, “I’m without a country.”
The American detective learns her possible purpose there, to “perform an exorcism on the past,” but the how of solving that known unknown is her challenge. She’s assisted by Krister Hammar, a land rights attorney with a detective’s curiosity and a reputation for asking the wrong questions. Their relationship makes the obligatory evolution from strangers to genial adversaries to friends, as they encounter numerous murders and undertake their own road trip to find those responsible.
Periodically, “Stranger” strains under the weight of its own expansive ambitions. We’re witness to a world of wayward Romani children, Swedish police officials, and faded industrial titans, among others. There’s such a big cast of characters, it gets difficult to track who’s who and how the various ancillaries link to the bigger story.
“Stranger” is sometimes hampered by an inconsistent authorial voice (perhaps to be expected as the product of two American authors writing for a Swedish publisher). Certain passages ascribed to an American – Brand – don’t ring idiomatically real. There’s a relative absence of the contractions that are, among other things, intelligently informal. “Cannot” and “was not,” for example, stand in for “can’t” and “wasn’t” in conversations where the informal would be more likely, given the context. Other conversational exchanges – one in particular, between Brand and another detective -- just aren’t believable as speech between law-enforcement professionals, reading like the language of a forensics textbook.
And at times, scenic-route atmospherics interrupt the forward thrust of the story; we’re led down culs-de-sac of historical exposition that take us nowhere, or at least nowhere that furthers our grasp of the story.
That story, at its core, is a strong one. Brand weathers numerous dangerous encounters en route to disquieting revelations about herself and her family history, revelations uncovered, artichoke-like, one layer at a time. By the end -- when justice is delivered and yes, revenge is served as cold as Sweden in February – Brand is a protagonist we care about.
In the early going, it might seem that Hollister and Reavill violate a prime directive of storytelling: Give a protagonist a bias for action, don’t keep that character forever at the mercy of events. But ultimately in this novel, there’s a deft balance at work -- Brand is both at the mercy of events and taking charge when she can to navigate through them – that resonates as real, uplifting and satisfyingly human. Maybe enough to make Veronika Brand a brand, and the linchpin for another book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review