The
Mountain King, by Anders de la Motte.
Scandy-Noir: since
Stieg Larsson conquered the world with ‘Girl With a Dragon Tattoo’, Swedish
thrillers have gained a huge part of the crime novel market – and rightly
so; there aren’t many that fall flat,
including ‘The Mountain King’ who does just the opposite, shocking the reader
to the very last page – literally! I’m
still thinking (and reeling from it) and wondering if de la Motte has already
written a sequel to release us from this tension or must we have to wait AAAAGES
for the next one. We are being forced to
Watch This Space.
A young couple have gone missing; because the female of the couple is beautiful
and her parents very wealthy, there is suspicion that her boyfriend has
kidnapped her and a ransom will soon be demanded – he’s an impoverished student
, not of good standing. It’s an
open-and-shut case if they can only find them.
Enter the Long Arm of the Law, consisting of Leonore
(known as Leo) Asker, a crack Detective Inspector with a very damaged
past; her reluctantly-learned survival
skills drilled in by her mentally Ill father are actually advantages in her job
and she expects to be the lead officer on the couple’s disappearance – until
she isn’t, usurped by a Big Wheel from Stockholm: she takes too many risks and breaks too many
rules. She is shifted sideways with a
move downstairs into the nether regions of the police building; she can preside over all the other failures
and would-be rebels. Whether she wants
to or not.
But her forced exile reveals that another detective was
working on cases which seem to have an uncanny similarity to the current
‘kidnapping’, until he fell down his stairs with a heart-attack; he is now in hospital in a coma, but he has
left a huge repository of notes and theories.
Maybe being consigned to the basement isn’t going to be as onerous as Leo
thinks, but the chilling conclusion she comes to after tracing at least four
other people to their eventual disappearance is that a serial-killer is at
work. And he takes a ‘souvenir’ from his
victims – and leaves one behind in the shape of a tiny plastic figure, just so
that he can laugh at the police and their stupidity, for the police, especially
the hot-shot from Stockholm have no idea of the significance of the figures –
or that he’s a monster, invincible, and truly the Mountain King.
Scandy-Noir has never been better, especially in the
hands of Anders de la Motte: hurry up
with Book Two! FIVE
STARS
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