‘Children of Fog Island: Fog Island’ by Mariette Lindstein

Published by HQ Books,
31 July 2025.
ISBN: 978-000824544-3 (PB)
Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

Laudatory reviews of Mariette Lindstein’s Fog Island trilogy often focus on the apparent authenticity of her descriptions of life in a cult, and for good reason. Born and raised on the west coast of Sweden, Lindstein joined the Church of Scientology at the age of twenty and was actively involved in the organisation for the following twenty-five years. Finally freeing herself – escaping with a fellow cult member whom she later marries – Lindstein decided to use her own experiences in her crime fiction novels to warn readers about the dangers of cults, including vivid depiction of the temptations posed by the cult mentality.

In Lindstein’s work, the cult in question is ViaTerra, a New Age movement based on Fog Island off the Swedish coast led by the charismatic Franz Oswald. While Children of Fog Island is the third book of Lindstein’s trilogy, it can be read as a stand-alone, containing sufficient background information for the reader unfamiliar with the first two to be gripped and enthralled by its narrative.

The main character is Sofia Bauman who, as an impressionable young girl, had fallen under Franz Oswald’s spell. Adrift and at a loss, having just graduated from university and ended a troubled relationship, she was vulnerable, an ideal candidate for seduction by the allure of a cult peopled by good-looking individuals radiating confidence in the tenets of their faith. In the first book of the trilogy, we see how people such as Sofia are attracted by cults, in the second, what happens if a person escapes a cult and, in the third, a description of children born to cult members.

In Children of Fog Island, Sofia, like Lindstrom herself, has escaped from a cult with a fellow former member and entered into a relationship with him. Sofia supervises a refuge for cult defectors and Benjamin runs a lucrative business from their home. They are the parents of Julia, an attractive and lively teenager, although Sofia harbors a secret fear that her daughter is actually Oswald’s, the result of his raping her: the event that triggered her decision to flee ViaTerra, setting fire to the manor house in the course of her escape as a kind of revenge. Oswald has recently been released from prison after serving a term of fifteen years for sexually assaulting a minor, and Sofia finds her thoughts constantly turning back to him and the period when she was imprisoned on Fog Island. When a fierce hurricane hits Sweden, she chances to see Oswald on the news and understands she can’t prevent his re-entering his life. Her worst fears are realized when Oswald contacts her, offering to help finance the rebuilding of her shelter, that has been destroyed by the storm.

The novel is told largely through Sofia’s viewpoint although Thor, one of Franz Oswald’s young twin sons by a young woman named Elvira, also records his thoughts and feelings growing up as a child of a cult leader. His brother Vic is his father’s favorite child, and Thor’s perspective of events is that of the despised outsider.

Lindstein provides a rollercoaster ride in the last book of her trilogy, filled with spills and thrills. Children of Fog Island is compulsively readable while shedding light on a topic that is timely but not yet well or widely understood: the attraction of cults.   
------
Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra.

Mariette Lindstein was born and raised in Halmstad on the west coast of Sweden. At the age of 20, she joined the Church of Scientology and worked for the next 25 years at all levels of the organization, including at its international headquarters outside Los Angeles. Mariette left the Church in 2004, and is now married to Dan Koon, an author and artist. They live in a forest outside Halmstad with their three dogs. Fog Island, her debut novel, was first published in Sweden where it won the Best Crime Debut at the Specsavers Crime Time Awards. Mariette now dedicates her life to writing and lecturing to warn others about the dangers of cults and cult mentality. Children of Fog Island is the third book in the Fog Island Trilogy. 

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.