Dark Pines / Will Dean

In a dense pine forest in central Sweden, a man is shot to death and enucleated. This modus operandi matches the "Medusa murders" committed in the same area 20 years earlier. Among the obvious suspects are the oddball inhabitants of Mossen, a village made up of 5 houses strung along the only road that penetrates to the heart of these woods.

Our narrator, Tuva Moodyson is a young reporter from the local weekly newspaper assigned to cover the event. Her approach, which focuses on those who are hurting rather than on sensationalist statements, stems from traumatic personal experience and, unfortunately, tends to rub people the wrong way. As she clumsily attempts to cope in an environment that terrorizes her and with individuals who perplex her, a second homicide further disrupts her fragile balance. While gossip and rumours fly about the possible identity of the killer, strange figurines appear on Tuva's doormat and the town's climate turns increasingly hostile towards her. Who is targeting her? Does this have anything to do with the murders?

Given the amount of praise heaped on this novel, I was looking forward to reading a twisted tale about a deaf bisexual crime-solving reporter. Alas, my disappointment was great.

For reasons I find puzzling, the author chose to demonstrate his protagonist's deafness by having her constantly fiddle with her hearing aids and put herself in precarious positions by disregarding the precautions she explicitly told us she must take to keep them functioning. Although she has ways of "coping" in the world, these are skimmed over in favour of her weaknesses. This, in addition to the fact that the main character's deafness constitutes the only original element in this narrative, turns Tuva's disability into little more than a gimmick. I'm all for representation in fiction, but this was a very strange way to go about it. (By the way, this criticism also goes for her bisexuality.) Also, her credulity, unworldliness, and lack of common sense and self-awareness even when dealing with events in a small town didn't do much to establish Tuva's credibility as an amateur sleuth.

Stepping into an arena brilliantly dominated by Scandinavian authors, and on their own turf no less, was an ambitious project. Although this novel is being promoted as super disturbing and sinister, in my opinion it's small beer compared with genuine Scandi noir. I've been re-reading other Swedish crime novels recently and I can't put my finger on what it is that makes them so dark. Whatever it is — its pervading bleak atmosphere, if you will —, I didn't detect it in Dark Pines. So many glowing reviews call this book thrilling and dark that perhaps my expectations were a little too high. Alas, I remained mostly unimpressed. Between an interesting concept (a deaf, bisexual reporter must face her deepest fears in order to solve a series of gruesome murders) and its execution, some vital element slipped from the author's grasp, and it fell flat. As a debut novelist, he may simply not yet have acquired the tools necessary to create a main character with sufficient depth and to convey how this character deals with her disability in a way that is natural believable without becoming obsessively minute or repetitive — unless his intention was to indicate obsessive-compulsive behaviour, in which case he might have made it clearer to readers.

If you want to read truly dark, disturbing Swedish crime fiction featuring flawed journalists who make questionable decisions, may I suggest Liza Marklund or Stieg Larsson?

I purchased this book online

Rating: **½