To the list of tenacious Scandi detectives with baggage--among them Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole--it's time to add a new name. As the nerve-rattling The Night Singer opens, Hanna Duncker has just moved from Stockholm back to Öland, from which she fled 16 years earlier, when her now-deceased father was imprisoned for a notorious murder.
On Hanna's first day at her new job with the Kalmar police, word arrives that the body of 15-year-old Joel Forslund has been found by a rest area. Hanna's father's legacy isn't the only facet of her past that she must confront--Joel is the son of her childhood best friend, with whom Hanna has been out of touch since she left Öland to escape the island's ill will toward her. The years haven't diminished at least one person's malice: Hanna begins receiving anonymous threatening phone calls that only heighten her resolve to find out "what really happened" 16 years earlier.
The first of Mo's books to be translated into English, The Night Singer offers an unexpected conclusion to its central mystery and leaves Hanna's personal quest tantalizingly unresolved, presumably to be teased in forthcoming titles in the projected Island Murders series. The novel is threaded with chapters from Joel's point of view that outline how he spent the last day of his life, which has the bittersweet effect of keeping him alive on the page and making his final moments, revealed at book's end, all the more crushing. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer