The Savage Altar by Asa Larsson

Asa Larsson's first novel The Savage Altar, also published under the title Sun Storm, won Sweden's Best First Crime Novel Award and has been translated into several languages. It is the story of tax lawyer Rebecka Martinsson, who reluctantly returns to her hometown after the vicious murder of a friend's brother. The murder investigation that unfolds illustrates Rebecka's connection to the victim and town, but never quite explains the sense of bondage she feels towards her friend, Sanna. Despite being a top ten bestseller in Sweden, Larsson consistently uses tired clichés and one-dimensional, over-familiar characters. Her attempts to deepen her heroine with stories from her youth are unconvincingly constructed, and many of the supporting cast are superfluous. The novel is heavily influenced by a line up of noir personalities, in the Assistant Chief Prosecutor, police officers and most notably a femme fatale in Sanna. There is something clumsy and uneasy at play in the writing though; Sanna's history seems improbable, and her supposed manipulation more a figment of the heroine's bitterness than reality. In spite of these flaws, Larsson evokes the freezing Swedish landscape effectively, albeit with unsophisticated metaphors, and the novel will be enjoyable for readers who can overlook the bland prose style. If the character of Rebecka Martinsson is to continue in a series of novels, as promised, some originality and spark is sorely needed.