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A Novel About a Crime
by Christoffer Carlsson
One town. Two crimes. Twenty years of silence.
Small towns sometimes have a voice of their own.
On a snowy winter night in 1999, Sander and Killian leave a house party together outside a small town in rural Sweden. The very best of friends, the two seventeen-year-olds imagine they will remain so forever. But by the next morning, a corpse is found in the trunk of a car, and each boy is a suspect in the murder. Each has something they want to conceal from the police. And from the other.
The hunt for the killer will take more than twenty years. It will see the lead detective leave the force forever. And it won't end until a second body turns up in similar circumstances, and the tight-knit community's secrets are finally brought to light.
In The Living and the Dead, renowned criminologist Christoffer Carlsson masterfully transports us to the fields and forests of western Sweden, a region of farmers and truck drivers torn apart by economic injustice and self-deceit—a world where the portal between the living and the dead is flung wide open and where no one is entirely innocent.
"As with Carlsson's excellent previous efforts, including Blaze Me a Sun (2023), this 'novel about a crime' goes beyond clever plotting to examine Swedish identity, life in a new era, and the ties between living and dying... brooding and brilliant." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Days before Christmas 1999 in the small Swedish town of Skavböke, eighteen-year-old Mikael Söderström and his friends are partying to celebrate the end of term. Mikael leaves the party around midnight but never returns home... Carlsson has a knack for psychological procedurals, as his latest proves, with numerous characters and motives to keep readers guessing... A must for Nordic noir and psychological mystery fans." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Devotees of Scandinavian noir will relish this." —Publishers Weekly
"A skillfully constructed psychological thriller." —Booklist
"I just don't know anyone else who writes quite like this. All the makings of a page-turning thriller, but with an emotional depth that is truly rare. Carlsson is far and away my favorite Scandinavian crime writer at the moment, and The Living and the Dead is among his very best." —Fredrik Backman, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"Here's a thriller to break your heart: a magnificent new novel, epic but immediate, menacing yet moral, that assembles some of the most beloved tropes of recent years—the frostbitten danger of Scandinavian crime; the small-town intimacy of Broadchurch—and charges them with fresh dark energy. And if you think international fiction isn't for you, The Living and the Dead proves that fear needs no translation." —A.J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
This information about The Living and the Dead was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christoffer Carlsson was born in 1986 in Marbäck, Sweden. He holds a PhD in criminology from Stockholm University and is one of Sweden's leading crime experts. He is the youngest winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, which he has won twice. The New York Times named his debut, Blaze Me a Sun, one of the best crime novels of the year. He lives in Stockholm.
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