{"id":5127,"date":"2015-12-18T06:58:35","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T11:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5127"},"modified":"2015-12-18T06:58:35","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T11:58:35","slug":"wolf-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5127","title":{"rendered":"****Wolf Winter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"arctic

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

By Cecilia Ekb\u00e4ck, narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan <\/a>\u2013 Swedish-born writer Ekb\u00e4ck\u2019s debut crime thriller is set in remote north Sweden in 1717. The long darkness of winter is closing in, and the scattered homesteads on Black\u00e5sen Mountain are preparing for what the signs suggest will be a rough time. The Lapps who have come south for the season say it will be a \u201cwolf winter,\u201d which they describe as \u201cthe kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal. Mortal and alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paavo, his wife Maija (MY-ah), and their daughters, 14-year-old Frederika and six-year-old Dorotea, are new arrivals from Finland, and they haven\u2019t spent a winter this far north before. They aren\u2019t sure what to expect, even though they don\u2019t know the mountain\u2019s dark history of evil portents and mysterious disappearances. One thing they do not expect is for Paavo to decide to leave his womenfolk on their own and travel to the coast to try to earn some money. He won\u2019t return before spring. And they definitely don\u2019t expect that Frederika and Dorotea will discover the mutilated corpse of one of their new neighbors, a man named Eriksson, in a glade where they\u2019d intended to pasture their goats.<\/p>\n

When Eriksson’s death comes to light, some of the neighbors attribute the savage attack to a bear, others suggest wolf, but Maija who is an earth-woman by training\u2014a midwife and healer\u2014insists the death was caused by a human agent. Almost certainly, a murderer is in their midst.<\/p>\n

Yet no one misses Eriksson, a man who made it his business to ferret out and exploit people\u2019s weaknesses. \u201cSometimes God did take the right people\u201d seems to be the view. In this tiny community in which everyone knows everyone else and, presumably, most of their secrets and hidden grudges, the layers of deception keep being peeled back.<\/p>\n

In the region’s central town the immense power of the church resides in the person of the priest, Olaus Arosander. He starts out as Maija\u2019s adversary, skeptical of her belief Eriksson was murdered. While he doesn\u2019t trust her kind of knowledge, he has secrets of his own that put him at odds with his church\u2019s views. Over time, Maija and Arosander both become committed to determining what happened to Eriksson, and whether his death is the end of violence on Black\u00e5sen Mountain or the beginning.<\/p>\n

The notion of wolves takes on both a corporeal and metaphoric significance in the story. It becomes clear that predators are ravaging the countryside, preying on the community\u2019s weakest members. Darkness, too, means more than the months\u2019 long absence of sunlight. It also refers to the special knowledge\u2014call it intuition, call it the ability to read signs, call it something more, but don\u2019t dare call it sorcery\u2014that helps Maija sort truth from misdirection. In that place and time, such \u201cspecial knowledge\u201d was a potentially deadly inheritance, one that Maija received from her dead grandmother and which she fears has been passed on to Frederika, who doesn\u2019t yet understand its power or how to control it.<\/p>\n

Wolf Winter<\/em> works well as an audio book. Bresnahan\u2019s narration is clear, and the characters are easy to distinguish both by the reader\u2019s voice and Ekb\u00e4ck\u2019s helpful cues regarding the speaker\u2019s identity. This is a perfect listen for the shortest days of the year\u2014preferably in front of a fire, in heavy socks and woolly robe, because the novel\u2019s chills come from both the weather so ably described and the hearts of the characters. Another great contribution to the Nordic noir tradition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website here<\/a>.
\n