by Will Dean
Black River by Will Dean is the third book featuring deaf reporter Tuva Moodyson. At the beginning of the story Tuva returns to Gavrik after finding out that her best friend Tammy is missing. She is disappointed that the local police and the people in the community aren’t doing more to find her so makes it her mission to investigate and find Tammy herself. It is only when a second woman goes missing that the search is amplified, and what follows is a race against time to find the two missing women before it is too late.
This was a slow burner for me. I found the first third of the book quite difficult to get into but I think that was mainly because I hadn’t read the previous two novels. It took me a while to work out the different characters and how they all fit together and there were a lot of references to events that had happened previously that I wasn’t fully aware of. However, as I continued to read, the characters really started to grow on me and the tension started to build up page by page. I flew through the last third of the story, desperate to find out what was going to happen. For me, part of the appeal with crime/detective novels is the challenge to work out who the perpetrator is, so as an added bonus, I thought I had worked out the ending, and I was completely wrong. There were lots of twists and turns and several different ways the plot could have been going at any point.
I have read a lot of Scandi Crime and even though I love the genre, they can sometimes be quite intense. They tend to have a lot of intricate plot details and lots of characters to keep track of. I’m not sure if Black River counts as a Scandi Crime – it is a crime/murder novel set in Sweden, but it is written by a British author and you can see the differences in the writing style. However, if you are a fan of this genre but are looking for something a bit lighter then this is definitely worth a read.
Thanks to NetGalley and Oneworld Publications for the opportunity to read and review it.
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