Yule Island (eBook)

The No. 1 bestselling, CHILLING gothic thriller - based on a TRUE STORY...

Johana Gustawsson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
276 Seiten
Orenda Books (Verlag)
978-1-914585-91-3 (ISBN)

Infos

An art expert joins a detective to investigate a horrific murder on a Swedish island, leading them to a mystery rooted in Viking rites and Scandinavia's deepest, darkest winter. The Queen of French Noir returns with a chilling, utterly captivating gothic thriller, based on a true story. FIRST in the The Lidingö Mysteries series. `Scarier than anything ... a dark, dark slice of atmospheric Scandi Noir´ Heat magazine *Book of the Month* `The pace steadily accelerates as Gustawsson orchestrates her plot with breathless ingenuity. A successful page-turner from a rising star´ Financial Times `Gustawsson's writing is so vivid, it's electrifying´ Peter James ** Winner of the Livre de Poche Readers Crime of the Year and Cultura Ligue de l'Imaginaire Award** ________ Don't Art expert Emma Lindahl is anxious when she's asked to appraise the antiques and artefacts in the infamous manor house of one of Sweden's wealthiest families, on the island of Storholmen, where a young woman was murdered nine years earlier, her killer never found. Emma must work alone, and with the Gussman family apparently avoiding her, she sees virtually no one in the house. Do they have something to hide? Trust As she goes about her painstaking work and one shocking discovery yields clues that lead to another, Emma becomes determined to uncover the secrets of the house and its occupants. When the lifeless body of another young woman is found in the icy waters surrounding the island, Detective Karl Rosén arrives to investigate, and memories of his failure to solve the first case come rushing back. Could this young woman's tragic death somehow hold the key? Anyone Battling her own demons, Emma joins forces with Karl to embark upon a chilling investigation, plunging them into horrifying secrets from the past - Viking rites and tainted love - and Scandinavia's deepest, darkest winter... ________ PRAISE FOR JOHANA GUSTAWSSON `Remember her name. Johana Gustawsson has become a leading figure in French crime fiction [and] Yule Island is impossible to put down´ Le Monde `Wonderfully dark and intricately woven ... will have you hooked from the very first page´ B A Paris `Johana Gustawsson has become the queen of the French thriller genre´ Le Point `Intriguingly dark and vivid, and so cleverly told´ Essie Fox `A gripping story of murder and black magic ...Gustawsson slowly weaves together three seemingly disparate strands of her narrative with a skill that shows why she is such an admired crime writer in her native France´ The Times `A wonderfully creepy, unsettling read, with a superb twist in its tail´ James Oswald `Bewitching and wonderfully gothic´ Sunday Express `Johana Gustawsson brilliantly illuminates the depths of the human heart' Le Figaro `A whirlpool that draws you irresistibly into levels of darkness so much deeper than you can possibly be ready for´ Ambrose Parry `Ethereal, romantic and as cold as death, this nerve-shattering and powerful novel immerses us in a cruel and thrilling Nordic tale where love smashes against the rocks of madness´ La Fringale culturelle `A stunning and beautifully written gothic thriller´ Alexandra Benedict `A bold and intelligent read´ Guardian `Utterly compelling´ Woman's Own `Cleverly plotted, simply excellent´ Ragnar Jónasson `A must-read´ Daily Express

Born in Marseille, France, and with a degree in Political Science, Johana Gustawsson has worked as a journalist for the French and Spanish press and television. Her critically acclaimed Roy & Castells series, including Block 46, Keeper and Blood Song, has won the Plume d'Argent, Balai de la découverte, Balai d'Or and Prix Marseillais du Polar awards, and is now published in nineteen countries. A TV adaptation is currently under way in a French, Swedish and UK co-production. The Bleeding was a number-one bestseller in France and is the first in a new series. Johana lives in Sweden with her Swedish husband and their three sons.

Textauszug

11

Karl

I pocket my phone and finish my breakfast standing at the kitchen counter. I wash the last two bites of my flatbread and cheese down with a swig of lukewarm coffee, then pour a fresh cup for my wife and leave it on the table.

The cold seizes me the second I step out onto the porch. Sheets of ice line the foreshore like the cheeks of a sea with a beard of snow. My frost-covered kayak is ready and waiting for me on the jetty, but I probably won’t have time before the sun sets at around three to get out there and paddle until the pain erases everything.

My wife and I share this need to be at one with the water every day. Freyja swims daily, and even at night. How many times have I seen her shivering body swallowed up by the black water before returning to me as if risen from a casket?

With a loud yawn, and stepping around the icy puddles, I walk across the garden to the narrow steps that lead to the jetty where our little runabout is tied up, covered with a sprinkling of snow. The boat’s engine sputters to life, and I sound just like it as I clear the burning-cold air from my throat.

A few hundred metres of inshore waters are all that separate Djursholm, where I live, from Rödstuguviken, where I’m expected – a bay in the small community of Sticklinge, at the north end of the island of Lidingö. The crossing only takes a few minutes, and soon I’m tying the boat up by the red wooden cottage that gives the cove its name.

The area has already been cordoned off to keep the rubberneckers at bay. There’s more of them than I’d have thought, given the early hour. Not to mention those scoping out the scene from their balconies or from behind their windows. And it’s quite the scene.

‘Hej.’ Alvid’s there to greet me. He’s the head of the NFC – the crime-scene team. He’s wearing his trademark white coveralls. ‘I figured we had no choice but to call you in for this one,’ he says by way of apology, pursing his lips.

I give him a friendly pat on the shoulder and walk with him down the jetty to the tent the NFC has erected on the small beach, a few metres up from the frozen water’s edge.

‘I’ll be with you in a second. I’m just going to have a word with these ladies first,’ I say, leaving him to go into the tent alone.

I walk over to a trio of seniors who are standing around chatting on the road by the red cottage.

One of them has a stripy beanie on her head. ‘Are you Detective Inspector Rosén?’ she asks me.

I nod.

‘See, Ilse, I told you it was him,’ she says to the woman to her left, who’s wearing a fur hat.

‘They told us we could put our clothes back on,’ the woman continues, turning back to me. ‘But I do wonder if that was the right thing to do.’

I look at her, uncomprehending.

‘The problem, Inspector,’ her friend Ilse explains, ‘is that the rest of your team here are still wet around the ears. Just look at them.’ She points to my officers, who are all hard at work. ‘I really don’t know if we should have listened to them. I mean, shouldn’t they have taken our … oh, my brain is getting so old, I don’t know … our fingerprints, that’s it!’

‘Assuming you didn’t touch the body, then no,’ I reply, only half joking.

‘Of course we didn’t. Heaven forbid!’ the third woman chimes in, pressing her palms to her chest.

‘And that wouldn’t have been an easy thing to do, obviously,’ Ilse adds. ‘She was trapped in the ice.’

I nod, appreciating the logic of her comment. ‘Can you tell me how you found the body?’

‘We were getting ready to go for a dip around eight, as usual, just the kind of thing to smooth out the wrinkles and wake up the heart,’ the third woman explains. ‘We swim here every day. There’s a few more of us on the weekend, but during the week it’s just the three of us besties from Braxenvägen. That’s the street just behind the house with the turret up there, see?’ She points to a building painted green and Falu-copper red. ‘Normally, we go into the water from the beach, where you’ve pitched your tent. But when the sea’s frozen over like it is today, we go in by the jetty, where you’ve moored your boat. Sometimes we have to poke a hole in the ice, or if it isn’t that thick, we just slide into it. It’s not that hard.’

The two other women nod.

‘And that was when we saw her.’

‘But we didn’t think it was – how should I put it? – a woman,’ Ilse continues. ‘We thought it must have been a mannequin or something. You know, the things you see in shop windows. With her pale skin, those glassy eyes, that dull blonde hair and those long slim legs of hers – and stark naked too. So we stood there looking at her for a while through the ice, cursing the hooligans who’d throw such a thing in the sea. We wondered how the heck we were going to get it out of the water.’

‘What did you do when you realised it was a … a body,’ I ask, making sure to soften my words.

‘Ilse thought we should try to get her out of the water,’ says the swimmer with the stripy hat, ‘but I told her there was no point. She looked dead enough to me, so I said we’d better call the police.’

I nod robotically, quite surprised by their composure.

‘Did you see anyone else in the area?’

‘Of course. Everyone’s on their way to work or school at that time.’

‘Did you notice anyone you didn’t recognise?’

They shake their heads in unison.

‘Thank you, ladies. You’re almost free to go. An officer will take a quick statement from you and a psychologist will be in touch.’

They turn and stare at me, their eyes like dinner plates.

‘A psychologist? Whatever for?’ Ilse asks.

‘To help you, er … to talk to you about the shock of what you found.’

‘Don’t you worry, Inspector, we’ll talk about it among ourselves. And with our swimming club friends this weekend. If there’s one thing you can be sure of, it’s that we’re going to talk about this!’

‘I don’t suppose we can go for a swim now?’ one of the other women pipes up.

‘You can, just not here in Rödstuguviken,’ I reply, thinking this intrepid trio and their nerves of steel would put many of the recruits on the force to shame.

I thank them again and duck back under the crime-scene tape to pull on the coveralls that one of my sergeants has ready for me. Then I enter the tent where the NFC officers are working in a silence broken only by the swishing of their protective gear.

The victim is lying on a stretcher.

‘Fifteen, maybe sixteen years old,’ Alvin says, joining me beside the body.

I shake my head.

I don’t have kids, and I probably never will. Still, nothing wrenches my heart more than the death of a child. The parents always die with them. It’s like they’re uprooted by their loss. The grief drains the life from them, even if they have other kids to support. And it’s not just the mothers who suffer. Sometimes the fathers are the first to lose their grip. They let themselves go and forget about the others who have also been left behind – those cursed to go on living in the wake of a sister or brother who’s never seemed more alive than in death.

‘She wasn’t in the water for long,’ Alvid explains.

It certainly doesn’t look like the sea and its creatures have had enough time to make a mess of the body. It’s frozen and blue from the cold – the temperature went down to minus eleven last night – which makes this death a little easier on the eye, at least for now. Her hair is soaking in a puddle around her head. It strikes me that the ladies who found her were right – to look at her, there’s nothing really human left. Rather, there’s something ethereal and intangible about her, as if I’m in the presence of one of Tolkien’s elves.

My gaze lands on the wounds on the insides of her thighs. Sealed and solidified by the cold, they look like two big claw marks.

‘Like I said,’ Alvid sighs. ‘We really needed you here.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asks, not daring to look at me.

‘I’ll be all right.’

Alvid nods and points to the pair of scissors attached to a leather cord around the victim’s neck. They’re now resting on the stretcher above her shoulder.

‘So, did those grannies see anything?’ he asks.

‘No, nothing at...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.11.2023
• Übersetzer: David Warriner
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Historische Kriminalromane
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• Schlagworte: A J West • Alexandra Benedict • Ambrose Parry • Andrew Taylor • Anna Mazzola • Antonin Varenne • b a paris • Block 46 • Blood Song • blue water • Bridget Collins • Burial Rites • Camilla Grebe • Catriona Ward • Christmas • Christmas Appeal • Christmas Guest • C J Tudor • Crime Fiction • Dead Sweet • Erin Young • essex serpent • Essie Fox • female sleuths • France • Ghosts • ghost ship • Gothic • Hard-boiled • haunting • hester • historical fiction • historical thriller • Horror • House of Whispers • international mystery • Island • James Oswald • janice hallett • Jennifer Saint • Johana Gustawsson • kate griffin • Kate Mosse • Keeper • Kingdom of Sweets • Laura Purcell • Laura Shephard Robinson • Laura Shepherd Robinson • Lesbian • LGBTQ • literary fiction • Liz Hyder • murder fiction • Mystery • Nordic Noir • Orenda Books • Peter Swanson • police procedurals • Prey • Romantic Suspense • Roy & Castells • Sarah Waters • scandi crime • Scandi Crime The Fascination • Scandinavian • S J Parris • Square of Sevens • Stacey Halls • supernatural romantic • Sweden • The Bleeding • The Fascination • The Murmurs • True story • Turnglass • Vikings • Viveca Sten • Weyward • Winter Spirits • Wisting • Yrsa Sigurdardottir • Yule Island
• ISBN-10: 1-914585-91-7 / 1914585917
• ISBN-13: 978-1-914585-91-3 / 9781914585913