Black River

Following the success of Dark Pines and Red Snow, Will Dean returns with the third instalment in the Tuva Moodyson story. Black River features the deaf reporter who has now left the local paper in Gavrik and moved to Malmö to pursue a career at a new newspaper.

Tuva has kept away from alcohol for four months, focusing on gaming instead, exchanging one addiction for another. She’s buried her own emotions under a tough uncompromising exterior. However, when she receives devastating news that her best friend Tammy Yamnim has gone missing, she drops everything and drives back to the place that influenced her adulthood so strongly. She is as determined and relentless as any detective worth their salt.

Tuva gets in touch with her friends in town and begins her investigation, parallel to the official police search. Malmö is in a fever of anxiety, fear and urgency, under the ruthless heat of the June sun, beset by the reckless atmosphere of the population downing their tools ahead of the traditional midsummer night celebrations. Soon another young woman, Lisa Svensson, vanishes and the panic level rises dramatically. There are questions about motives, possible suspects, the whereabouts of both women and the ever-present dread that they might not be found alive.

In the overwhelming, exhausting, scorching weather it’s no wonder Tuva’s physical and emotional health seems to be taking a massive hit. But she continues to visit unsafe places, prod Sally the snake breeder, push strange cousins who transform shipping containers into living pods, interrogate lumberjacks, and take part in combing through the undergrowth in a large woodland. Although uncomfortable in the raw natural environment and battling with some personal demons, she ploughs through masses of insects and unpleasant men.

The multi-guised darkness of the surrounding nature is not nicely balanced by the lightness of the people who are totally enveloped by it. Quite the opposite. The ancient Utgard forest, encircling the small civilisation of Gavrik, is as much a huge, imposing character in its own right as the complicated heroine and the assorted strange people who people the pages of the book, especially those connected to the menacing location of Snake River Salvage. As Tuva searches for Tammy and Lisa, she realises yet again how the classic small-town mentality and its close connections have shaped generations of locals whose existences are truly unusual. They are wary of outsiders, secretive, suspicious, and with a specific attitude to anything that is not pure Swedish.

I have not read such spectacular descriptions of an intense unsettling midsummer mood for a long time. ‘Just cos there’s no night-time don’t mean there’s no darkness’ says Thord, a local cop and Tuva’s friend. This sense of time and space is so perfectly captured in Black River that you will start to understand how the abundance of summer light can trigger excessive emotions and why Tuva becomes an unforgettable Swedish protagonist, always searching for answers.