The Savage Altar - Softcover

Larsson, Asa

3.63

21,449 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141024712 ISBN 13: 9780141024714

Publisher: Penguin, 2008

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Innocence will be sacrificed...

On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies ritually mutilated and defiled – and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall.

Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the small town she’d left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm tax lawyer, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the church of the cult he helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor, and to confront the rumours circulating in a closed and frightened community. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark and impossible to guess...

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

The days when crime in translation was regarded as some kind of exotic hothouse flower are long gone – nowadays, a book like Asa Larsson’s The Savage Altar will be eagerly picked up by those seeking something out of the ordinary in the crime field. The reasons are twofold: the promise of an unusual setting (here, a vividly realised Sweden) and writing of more style and elegance than can be found in much native product (not always the case, of course, as a novel in translation is only as good as the skill with which its translator renders it into English).

Asa Larsson’s compelling novel features a strongly drawn protagonist who is to feature in a projected series: corporate lawyer Rebecka Martinsson, reluctantly enlisted by her friend Sanna, who is under suspicion regarding the grisly death of a famous writer of religious books, Viktor Strandg�rd; the latter has had both hands and eyes removed in a bloody killing in a church in Northern Sweden. Also involved in the subsequent investigation is canny police inspector Anna-Maria Mella, dragooned into the case by a colleague, despite being incapacitated by her advanced state of pregnancy. Like Lynda la Plante’s Jane Tennison, these are women who are struggling in a world of unsympathetic men (and Larsson peoples her cast with some extremely nasty males), but Larsson’s writing is more ambitious than her British colleague, with a level of plotting that excels in both ambition and achievement. It will be interesting to see what the author cooks up for her beleaguered heroine in future books. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

Nail-biting . . . A suspense-filled mystery by yet another talented Swedish writer (Sunday Telegraph)

A labyrinthine conspiracy, superlative storytelling (Independent)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.