A Darker Shade of Sweden Read Online Free PDF

seems bright. And considering its sudden global appeal, there is also reason to believe that it will continue to attract talented, innovative, and original writers who will widen and enrich it even further.
    After that optimistic thought, I won’t keep you any longer. In the following pages, you will meet many of the writers who have shaped the Swedish crime fiction field as it exists today and a few who I believe will help shape it tomorrow. I hope you will enjoy getting to know them, and reading the stories they have to tell.
    John-Henri Holmberg
    Viken, July 2013

REUNION
    T OVE A LSTERDAL
    Before publishing her first novel in 2009, Tove Alsterdal worked mainly as a journalist and playwright. As with most writers, her experiences are many and varied. She was born in Malmö but has lived mainly in Stockholm; nevertheless, she also has roots in the far north of Sweden, in Tornedalen, an area close to the Swedish border with Finland and largely north of the Arctic Circle. This was where her mother grew up, and Tove Alsterdal returns there for summers. It is the setting of her latest novel, I tystnaden begravd (Buried in Silence), runner-up for the 2012 Best Novel of the Year Award given by the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy. She walked horses at the Stockholm outdoor museum Skansen and worked as an aide in the closed wards at Beckomberga mental hospital. Later, she was a radio and TV news reporter, and she wrote scripts for TV dramas and a feature film, stories for computer games, stage plays, and an opera libretto. A close friend of crime author Liza Marklund, she has edited all except the first of Marklund’s crime novels.
    Tove Alsterdal’s writing is psychologically acute and full of the settings she knows and loves to re-create on the page. There is often a strong streak of the mystical, seemingly inexplicable, in her work—but one of her great strengths is that she leaves the choice of how to interpret such elements to her readers, as in this story of a late reunion of teenage friends.
    SHE STEPS OUT OF HER CAR AND SLOWLY WALKS DOWN TOWARDS THE lake. It draws her. The paved walkway disappears between a couple of birches and becomes a path. A dizzying feeling of time rushing off, back to then.
    Its black waters.
    It is the same lake, the same time of summer as it was then. Just before midsummer, before the heat has permeated the ground and the greenery is still tender and young. The water as dark and tempting as in the nightmares she has had ever since. Not always, to be fair. There have been weeks, even years, when she has managed to sleep calmly, as when Lisette was just a baby.
    â€œOhmygaawd, it’s been so long! Marina! Piiiaaaa!!”
    â€œAgge!”
    Two other cars have driven up and parked next to hers. The women yell loud enough to make the famous birdlife flutter up from lake pastures and reeds, take cover deeper into the woods.
    She forces a smile and turns to meet them.
    â€œJojjo, is it really you?” Marina takes the last few steps at a run and hugs her. Watches her face, pushes back a strand of hair. “Shit, you look just the same. You haven’t changed a bit.” She turns to the others, who are unloading baskets and bags full of food from their cars. “Have you seen who’s here already? Johanna!”
    They laugh and shout and soon she is wrapped in everyone’s arms, they hug and agree that all are just as they were.
    And it’s fabulous to meet again! After thirty years! And you don’t look a day over twenty-five! Well, neither do you! They laugh at absolutely everything. And as they tumble into the tiny scout’s cottage she thinks, how great that I decided to come after all. That I didn’t give in to that feeling of just wanting to hide. There is a warmth between them she had forgotten. They have known each other since such an early age that those thirty years are shed in just a moment. Or so it feels at that particular moment when they