Peachy Reads

After six-year-old Maja tragically and mysteriously disappears on a family winter hike to a nearby lighthouse, her father Anders falls into a pattern of drunken depression. Eventually returning to the island where it happened, he suddenly feels an eerie connection with his lost daughter and senses that she is not gone. Other strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to happen, villagers act as if they are possessed, houses are burnt down, and mysterious and frightening things happen after nightfall. Everything seems to be linked to an ominous presence inhabiting the sea surrounding the island, centered at the lighthouse at Gåvasten where Maja disappeared. Harbor takes place mostly on the fictional island of Domarö in the sea of Åland east of Stockholm. The story spans several generations, so the reader is offered a historical and social context for the strange happenings that have taken place and continue to take place on the island. There are some flashbacks that offer an almost nos...

My detective novel tour of Scandinavia continues to Iceland where we meet Inspector Erlendur, a gritty individual who is married to his job, doesn’t take good care of himself, frequently falls asleep and wakes in the morning in an easy chair in his living room, worries about his daughter... Sound familiar? He's really not so unlike Kurt Wallander for those who may be pining for the Swedish gumshoe after the series concluded with The Troubled Man . In Jar City an old man has his head bashed in with a large ash tray, and a mysterious note left near the body and a cryptic photo of a grave site offer clues to the mystery surrounding his death. The circumstances of his murder are rooted in events that happened forty years ago and it is ingenious how Erlendur teases out the details of the connections between people and events that gradually reveal the identity of the murderer. The key to linking perpetrator to victim is a marker of an unusual genetic disease recorded in Iceland’s geneti...