As a journalist, Olivier Truc has extensively reported on the Sami people, who inhabit the icy northern region of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Traditionally reindeer herders, the Sami have a distinctly separate culture from their Scandinavian neighbors. Truc's knowledge of the Sami and their history is clear in Forty Days Without Shadow, his fiction debut.
For centuries, Scandinavian pastors burned the drums of Sami shamans, trying to eradicate their "heathen" ways. There are only a few of these historic drums left in the world and they're all in the hands of museums or private collectors. A French collector returns his drum to the Sami people, but on the very first day that the sun reappears after its annual 40-day absence, the instrument is stolen before it's ever put on display. Klemet Nango, a Sami officer of the Reindeer Police (responsible for policing the herders), and his naïve young Norwegian partner, Nina Nansen, are assigned to the case.
This is the biggest case the two detectives have ever investigated, and their abilities are stretched to the limit. Just as they begin their search for the drum, a truculent herdsman is found dead with his ears cut off--it may be a related crime. Klemet and Nina have to manage Sami protesters outraged by the drum's theft, right-wing protesters upset with the Sami, belligerent reindeer herders and the sheer difficulty of conducting an investigation in such a geographically remote area.
Truc's novel tells the story of a beleaguered culture and individuals who are determinedly clinging to a way of life that seems at odds with modern society. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm