THE RESTING PLACE

After writing about an investigation into a town that was mysteriously depopulated 60 years ago (The Lost Village, 2021), Swedish author Sten returns for another surgical excavation of the past, this time of her troubled heroine’s family.

Victoria Eleanor Fälth has always had a complicated relationship with the grandmother who raised her after her mother died, but none of that friction has prepared her to find Vivianne Fälth dying and the person who cut her throat escaping. Since Eleanor, as everyone but Vivianne calls her, has prosopagnosia, a condition that makes her unable to recognize faces, she’s the world’s worst eyewitness, and the police quickly abandon the possibility of getting any useful information out of her. Meantime, her grandmother’s hold over her life persists with the news that she’s left Eleanor Solhöga, a country estate Eleanor never knew she’d owned. Invited to inspect the place, Eleanor brings her live-in partner, Sebastian, and probate lawyer Rickard Snäll to help with its inventory. Soon after they arrive, they’re unexpectedly joined by Eleanor’s dislikable aunt, Veronika, but not by Mats Bengtsson, the groundskeeper, who’s gone mysteriously missing. Cut off from the rest of the world by the isolated location and an obligatory blizzard, the visitors lose their cellphone service, then their access to the road back to the outside world, then the electricity that’s kept them warm. All the while, Eleanor, who’s found a diary kept half a century earlier by Vivianne’s Polish-born servant, Anushka, tries to figure out what buried secrets could have led to her grandmother’s murder. The pace, at first maddeningly deliberate, gradually accelerates, unleashing a whirlwind of revelations that will leave some readers still shaking their heads in bewilderment after the fade-out.

Deep-laid, tightly wound, and very, very cold.