Blackwater

From Publishers Weekly
Annie Raft and her six-year-old daughter arrive in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater one midsummer night to meet Annie's boyfriend, who never shows up. In the morning, they stumble across two campers who have been stabbed to death in their tent. At the center of the subsequent murder investigation are the town's physician, who could have mistaken the campers for his wife and her lover; the members, including Annie's boyfriend, of a back-to-the-earth commune; and the Brandbergs, a family of rough-and-tumble locals who don't cotton to outsiders. It turns out that the youngest Brandberg, Johan, terrified of his father and half-brothers, has recently run away from home and in fact was seen passing close to the murder site on the night the campers were killed. Eighteen years later, with the double murders still unsolved, a string of coincidences leads to Annie's death and the eventual unraveling of the mystery. This is splendid fiction, dark and compelling, filled with off-center characters and ominous events, told smoothly through multiple points of view. Its setting-the logging-ravaged Scandinavian woods-matches perfectly the sense of gloom that permeates the plot. Despite having written 16 previous novels, Ekman is making her English-language debut here, and the translation seems flawless. It's no surprise that this novel, first published in Sweden in 1993, has won the Swedish Crime Academy's Award for Best Crime Novel, the August Prize and the Nordic Council's Literary Prize. Major ad/promo; author tour; foreign rights sold in 14 countries. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Blackwater is a densely plotted psychological thriller set in northern Sweden, near the Norwegian border. Centered around the unsolved murder of two sleeping campers, the novel focuses on the anguish of Annie Raft, a teacher who discovers the bodies, and Birgir Torbjornsson. Eighteen years later Annie again sees the mysterious young man she saw running through the woods that night. He is her daughter's lover. Annie's identification sets in motion a spiral of tragic events that lead to the shocking denouement. In her first novel to be published in the United States, Ekman, the winner of several literary awards in Sweden, creates an aura of fear and malaise as she depicts a suspicious, isolated community shocked by a crime but unwilling to give up one of its own. She infuses the novel with the eerie atmosphere of the North, where it's either always dark or light but never truly warm. Blackwater is rich in psychological nuance and character. Highly recommended.Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Beverly Lowry
. . . a rich adventure, the kind of long, lush, thoughtful page-turner many of us crave but rarely get our hands on . . .


From Booklist
Ekman is one of Scandinavia's most renowned mystery writers. Blackwater, her seventeenth novel but the first to be translated into English, won the Swedish Crime Academy's August Prize for best crime novel. It is a disturbing book, set in a small, bleak village in the distant north of Sweden where the only diversions seem to be gossip, drinking, and adultery. Blackwater is a community without hope; even the virgin forest is being clear-cut. Annie Raft and her six-year-old daughter, Mia, show up in the community on Midsummer Eve, 1974, planning to join a local commune but, instead, happen upon the bodies of two people who have been horribly murdered. Despite the best efforts of the bulldoglike local constable, the crime cannot be solved, and one of the victims cannot even be identified. Eighteen years later, Annie sees the face of the man she saw fleeing the murder site that awful night; unfortunately, he is now courting Mia. Ekman hasn't written a traditional mystery, with a crime that is followed in succession by its investigation and the presentation of its solution; rather, this is a novel about how murder unravels the fragile weave of family and society. If Ingmar Bergman had written mysteries, a novel like Blackwater would have been the result. Recommended for the same audience who made a best-seller of Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow (1993). George Needham


Midwest Book Review
A woman and her daughter arrive at a remote Swedish town to join a man in a commune, but his absence leads her to stumble on a gruesome murder in the dangerous small town of Blackwater. Ekman's novel is slow to build but the attention to fine characterization is excellent and the eventual surprising dramas prove satisfying.


Review
"Thrilling...a superbly written and atmospherically engaging crime novel." --Sven Birkerts, The Washington Post Book World

"Wonderful..powerfully enigmatic. . .extremely intelligent. . .Blackwater workds so brilliantly both as a mystery and an evocation of an unfamiliar world." --Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"Sriking ...Graham Greene meets Dean Koontz." --Entertainment Weekly

"Never uninvolving. . .keeps us guessing. . .Ekman tosses out conventional plot mechantics and stuns us with unexpected tragedy and twist after twist." --Peter Handel, San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle

"Mesmerizing. . .like Smilla's Sense of Snow, it is beautifully written, absorbing, and accessible. It makes you hold your breath." --Newsday



Book Description
On Midsummer's Eve, 1974, Annie Raft arrives with her daughter Mia in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a nearby commune. On her journey through the deep forest, she sumbles upon the site of a grisly double murder--a crime that will remain unsolved for nearly twenty years, until the day Annie sees her grown daughter in the arms of one man she glimpsed in the forest that eerie midsummer night.

Like Gorky Park and Smilla's Sense of Snow, Blackwater is a unique trhiller in which the hearts and minds of the characters are as strikingly compelling as the exotic northern landscape that envelops them.



Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Swedish


About the Author
Kerstin Ekman is the author of seventeen novels that have been published in Scandinavia and Europe. Blackwater--her first novel published in English--received the Swedish Crime Academy's Award for best crime novel, the August Prize, and the Nordic Counci's Literary Prize. She lives in Valsjobyn, a small village in northern Sweden.



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Blackwater is a densely plotted psychological thriller set in northern Sweden, near the Norwegian border. Centered around the unsolved murder of two sleeping campers, the novel focuses on the anguish of Annie Raft, a teacher who discovers the bodies, and Birgir Torbjornsson. Eighteen years later Annie again sees the mysterious young man she saw running through the woods that night. He is her daughter's lover. Annie's identification sets in motion a spiral of tragic events that lead to the shocking denouement. In her first novel to be published in the United States, Ekman, the winner of several literary awards in Sweden, creates an aura of fear and malaise as she depicts a suspicious, isolated community shocked by a crime but unwilling to give up one of its own. She infuses the novel with the eerie atmosphere of the North, where it's either always dark or light but never truly warm. Blackwater is rich in psychological nuance and character. Highly recommended.-Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.


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