27 April 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-52940-735-8 (PB)
Scandi crime has never been among my favourite sub-genres – the unrelieved monochrome setting has always seemed to form a backdrop for gloomy stories without much to lighten them. But in Jo Spain’s capable hands the gloom lifts, and despite the black and white landscape the story has plenty of colour.
Vicky Evans disappeared while she was working as a tour guide in a luxury winter resort in the small Lapland town of Koppe. When her body emerges from a frozen lake, her brother Alex sets off for Koppe to bring her home for burial – but when he arrives, he learns that a post-mortem has revealed that Vicky was murdered. Unimpressed by the local police, headed up by Agatha Koskinen, Alex sets about an enquiry of his own, and makes an alarming discovery. Over a period of twenty years, three young women have gone missing in Koppe, and no trace has ever been found of any one of them.
One of Jo Spain’s main skills lies in creating characters who could walk off the page and carry on living outside the story, and there are plenty of them in this rich, atmospheric thriller. Alex is in a lucrative but highly unsatisfying job, uncomfortable in his skin, mistrustful, and with a temper he finds hard to keep in check. The investigation becomes a journey of self-discovery for him. Agatha is dependable, perceptive and competent, but she has a complicated home life which threatens to impinge on her work. She learns things about herself, too. Miika, husband of one of the other missing women and a local pariah, is dark and brooding but with his own vulnerabilities. Niamh, Vicky’s closest friend and the person who reported her missing, is less fragile than she appears. There’s also a large cast of resort staff, police and locals, all individuals and instantly recognizable each time they reappear.
And then there’s that landscape, or more accurately snowscape. Almost unrelieved white it may be; monochrome and gloomy it’s not. Agatha is not alone among the locals in navigating it effortlessly, even on the mountainside in a blizzard that adds a whole new dimension to white-out. The snow-covered lake where Vicky died is indistinguishable from the road alongside it and has a large part to play. The outdoor cold is bone-freezing, and the descriptions of it made me shiver and reach for an extra sweater, but there’s warmth and colour indoors, where much of the action takes place.
The story twists, turns and dances between the investigation into Vicky’s murder in the present, and flashback chapters leading to the fate of Kaya, the first girl to disappear. Secrets emerge, alliances form, possible solutions are explored and discarded, and the diverse strands tangle together to create a complex, multi-layered pattern. The denouement, when it finally comes, took me by surprise – but was no less inevitable for that.
This was another page-turner
from Jo Spain, the product of meticulous research but wearing it lightly. This
lady is becoming a force to be reckoned with the in the generously populated
world of crime writing. She may not be famous yet, but she will be.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
Jo Spain is vice-chair of business body InterTrade Ireland and a parliamentary assistant in Leinster House. Her first novel With our Blessing was published by Quercus, London and was one of seven books shortlisted in the Richard and Judy search for a bestseller competition 2014. The book is based on the investigations of a Dublin-based detective team led by Tom Reynolds. It was launched in Ireland in September 2015 and became a top-ten bestseller that month. The rights have been snapped up in Germany. Since the she has published ten further books. Jo lives in Dublin with her husband and their four young children.
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