Book #2: Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft
Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I managed to buy the third book in this detective series cheap, but decided to start from the beginning, just for the sake of continuity.
This book was originally written in Swedish, so it is easy to draw comparisons with Stieg Larsson's Millennium series.
The central character, Malin Fors, is a divorced mother, trying to parent her teenage daughter Tove, as well as solve the murder of a man, who was found hanging in a woodland, apparently connected with a pagan ritual. The incident seems to be connected to the rape of his social worker, and this results in Malin investigating the woman's family, who appear to be her prime suspects.
Malin Fors is an intriguing character, who seems prepared to do whatever it takes to solve a case, and making her into a harassed mother added an extra dimension to her. The narrative was mostly written in the present tense, although there was some written in the past tense, although that might have just been an error in the translation. I noticed at times, it switched to first-person narrative, written from the points of view of specific characters, and some of it was written from the point of view of the murdered man, giving the book a supernatural quality, almost as though his ghost were watching all of the events unfold.
I noticed that not all of the loose ends in the book were wrapped up, and I'll be interested to see if they continue into the future titles; I'll definitely keep reading this series.
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