Forty Days Without Shadow: An Arctic Thriller

by Olivier Truc

Grand Central Publishing (April 1, 2014)

400 pages - 9.16 $ (kindle)

Tomorrow, the sun will rise for the first time in 40 days. Thirty minutes of daylight will herald the end of the polar night in Kautokeino, a small village in northern Norway, home to the indigenous Sami people. 

But in the last hours of darkness, a precious artifact is stolen: an ancient Sami drum. The most important piece in the museum's collection, it was due to go on tour with a UN exhibition in a few short weeks. 

Hours later, a man is murdered. Mattis, one of the last Sami reindeer herders, is found dead in his gumpy. 

Are the two crimes connected? In a town fraught with tension--between the indigenous Samis fighting to keep their culture alive, the ultra-Lutheran Scandinavian colonists concerned with propagati-ng their own religion, and the greedy geologists eager to mine the region's ore deposits--it falls to two local police officers to solve the crimes. Klemet Nango, an experienced Sami officer, and Nina Nansen, his much younger partner from the south of Norway, must find the perpetrators before it's too late...

What's good about it

The atmosphere, freezing as hell, the Sami (unknown people for me but oh so interesting!), for its landscapes, immense and wild, for the love of the sun and of the daylight so rare in Lapland winter but so desired and desirable. Olivier Truc knows how to make an unknown place alive, close and familiar. This is his strength but sometimes it doesn't do well for some readers... Honey, who was trying for the first time a crime ficton, said after reading a single page "so much writing for just a single line of dialogue! Do you have something that moves more?" Because no, it's not face-paced, even though the two officers never stop to investigate but the distances and the cold weather does not help - it must be said - and everything takes longer time in this context so special, which makes this book very realistic in the end.

Talking characters. Klemet and Nina, the two main sympathetic characters and police officer of the reindeer police, are very different, since Klemet, close to retirement, is Sami, while Nina is a cop just out of school and from a region south of the country where issues related to indigenous are unknown. Culture shock is present between these two, even if they finally manage to get along through their desire to unmask the killer. In other characters, we also have a racist cop on the edge of caricature, a particularly nasty and rude person, an unscrupulous old farmer and a few more endearing old Sami. Despite some irritating (the villain was sometimes - especially towards the end - unnecessarily vulgar as if the author intended by the language used to make us understand that this man is the villain of the story. Process altogether very unnecessary and slightly irritating in my case), the characters really help us understand the Sami reality, the difficulties of coexistence between different cultures and the fragility of some lost traditions.

I enjoyed discovering the Sami culture that I absolutely didn't know of (surprising, right?), I also enjoyed being immersed in the landscapes of Lapland, I least enjoyed the biting cold so faithfully transpose ​​(but it's probably due to the fact that the Quebec winter is too similar...) Noteworthy: the history of the mineral rush, very interesting. I least enjoyed the conclusion of the investigation, a bit fast compared to the slower pace of the book. But nonetheless Forty Days Without Shadow is a wealth of information both on the culture, geology and history of Lapland. That alone, is worth a look!

In a nutshell

Descriptive stories are not my cup of tea but I know that this book will appeal to fans of ethnological crime fiction because it's Olivier Truc's strength: being able to make us live in Lapland during the 400 pages of the book. This is a 3.5 / 5 for me.

Forty Days Without Shadow won several prices in Europe: prix du meilleur polar, prix mystère de la critique, prix quai du polar

The Fixer

A Justice Novel

de T. E. Woods

Alibi (Feb. 4 2014)

312 pages - 2.99 $ (Kindle)

T. E. Woods delivers a fast-paced thriller—the first in an electrifying new series—peopled with sharp, intriguing characters and more twists and turns than a corkscrew.

Never a doubt. Never a mistake. Always for justice. Never for revenge.She’s the person you hire when you need something fixed - permanently. With a strict set of criteria, she evaluates every request and chooses only a few. No more than one job per country, per year. She will only step in if it’s clear that justice will not be served any other way. Her jobs are completed with skill and precision, and never result in inquiry or police investigation. The Fixer is invisible - and quite deadly. . .

In the office of a clinical psychologist in Olympia, Washington, a beautiful young woman is in terrible emotional pain. She puts up walls, tells lies, and seems to speak in riddles, but the doctor is determined to help her heal, despite the fact that she claims to have hurt many people. As their sessions escalate, the psychologist feels compelled to reach out to the police . . . but it might be too late.

In Seattle, a detective gets a call from his son. A dedicated journalist, he wants his father’s expertise as he looks into a suspicious death. Together they follow the trail of leads toward a stone-cold hired killer—only to find that death has been closer than either could have imagined.

What's good about it?

It 's been awhile since I had not been completely blown away by a book and this was the case for The Fixer. The middle of the novel was a big twist. Perhaps other readers - especially those who rack their brains to find the clues and try to solve the mystery by themselves - will not be as surprised as me. But for readers like me - the kind who likes to be surprised - this is pure happiness!

Reading the blurb of the book, I was curious to see how the killer would be written. Does she would be very too masculine or too aggressive, as female killers can be seen in much of the books or movies... Well, not at all. T.E. Woods managed to make The Fixer very effective - fatally efficient - without making a monster of her. Instead, we are surprised to be on her side of " righteousness " as some cops in the book by the way. What's good it that one enjoys as much the criminal as the police who track her and especially Mort Grant, the detective. We discover technical aspects used by the police to investigate and, again, the effectiveness shows up. No caricatures in this novel, no exaggerated characters but realistic ones with realistic motifs.

About the course of the story, again, no complaints about the accuracy and realism of the investigation. The noose tightens around the killer, as well as the link between her and the police and you want to know how she'll do to get away or what Mort will do about her. You know it's wrong to kill people... that she should stop doing that but at the same time you don't want her to go to prison for having freed the world of perfect criminals who knew how to play with the law to get their free card. At one point everything seems to be going well, then everything changes... then everything changes... Until the end of the book where, frankly, I wanted to shed a tear... then everything changes!

In a nutshell

A very good book, the first one of a series. With characters intelligently written and realistics. A series of twists and a story that keeps you going! It is a 4/5 for me!

*******

I received this book from Random House Publishing Group - Alibi on NetGalley , to make an honest critique .