The Darkest Room

August 3, 2009
At the start of Theorin's intense and atmospheric thriller, his second after Echoes from the Dead
, Stockholm schoolteacher Joakim Westin has just joined his wife, Katrine, and their two young children at their new house on Eel Point on the northern island of Öland. When Katrine mysteriously drowns in shallow water near Eel Point's twin lighthouses, Joakim can't shake the feeling that Katrine is still with him. Though the police declare Katrine's death an accident, a new rookie cop in the area, Tilda Davidsson, isn't convinced and quietly pursues her own investigation. Joakim and Tilda's paths intertwine as they both uncover disturbing secrets about Eel Point's past. Theorin crafts a modern ghost story, expertly weaving together the present with glimpses into the lives—and deaths—of Eel Point's previous residents. Fans of dark Scandinavian crime fiction will welcome this new voice.

October 1, 2009
One-hundred-and-fifty years of dark doings come to a head in a Christmas Eve whiteout on the Swedish island ofÖland.

For the first seven years of their marriage, Joakim and Katrine Westin have leapfrogged from one fixer-upper to the next, refurbishing each one before selling it and moving on to the next. But the manor house in magnificently desolate Eel Point feels as if it may be their final destination. And so it is for Katrine, who's drowned while Joakim is back in Stockholm packing up the last of their things. Rookie police officer Tilda Davidsson finds it hard to believe that Katrine went out in the cold after lunch and simply fell or jumped into the icy sea, but there's no evidence to support her suspicion of murder. A series of audiotaped interviews with her great-uncle Gerlof, however, adds further layers to the blasted history of Eel Point, which a series of flashbacks indicates has been cursed ever since the house was built from timbers salvaged from an 1846 shipwreck. Katrine's own family, including her painter mother and her famous painter grandmother, is particularly troubled. No wonder the place is home to a good deal of other suspicious behavior, from a series of wantonly destructive burglaries in the neighborhood to Katrine's spooky posthumous visitations to Joakim and their children.

The Swedish landscape Theorin (Echoes from the Dead, 2008) presents as if in an endless single breath is as bleak as Henning Mankell's, but a lot more eventful.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from September 1, 2009
Theorins second novel, after Echoes of the Dead (2008), again takes place on the Swedish island of land and features, in a secondary role, amateur sleuth Gerloff. He gets involved in a new investigation after his great-niece, Tilda, becomes the officer in charge of a drowning case. The victim, Katrine, a seemingly happy wife and mother, had only recently moved to the old lighthouse keepers house on Eels Point; her devastated husband, Joakim, is left alone in the huge and possibly haunted house as winter sets in on the island. As Joakim deals with his grief, Tilda doggedly investigates both Katrines death and a rash of burglaries. The modern-day plotline is framed by multiple stories tied to the names and death dates that are carved on the wall of the cavernous barn on the Eels Point property. The island of land comes alive in Theorins telling, which works both as an atmospheric thriller and as a psychological study of crime and grief. The Darkest Room is among the very best of Scandinavian crime thrillers. Suggest to readers who liked Alvtegens Missing (2008), Mankells new work of literary fiction, The Italian Shoes (2009), or the more traditional but equally atmospheric thrillers by Asa Larsson.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)