The Savage Alter

And now for something completely different: Åsa Larsson's The Savage Altar (published as Sun Storm in the US), the first of her novels set in Kiruna in northern Sweden and featuring the lawyer Rebecka Martinsson.

When an evangelical lay preacher is found murdered and mutilated in his church in Kiruna, his sister Sanna calls her old friend Rebecka Martinsson, a stressed out tax lawyer living in Stockholm, for legal advice. Against her better judgement, Rebecka returns to her home town — and all its bad memories — in an attempt to keep Sanna and her kids out of trouble. As the police investigation, lead by the heavily pregnant Anna-Maria Malle and her stoic sidekick Sven-Erik Stålnacke, starts to focus in on the three priests in charge of the church, Rebecka finds herself forced to face the things that drove her to move away from Kiruna in the first place.

There's a lot to like in Larsson's first novel. The setting is beautifully drawn — Rebecka's grandmother's house sounds wonderful — the murder is suitably grizzly and the perpetrators positively vile human beings. Rebecka is an engaging character, spiky, frequently unhappy, but there are moments when she lights up with an infectious joy. And Larsson certainly doesn't spare her the mill: her horrible, frantic life as a Stockholm lawyer feels grimly authentic, while the denouement requires her to confront her past in the worst way possible. Anna-Maria, too, is a delight. She's clever, tenacious, determined to help out despite being pregnant, and (like Patrik Hedström) a truly appalling driver.

Flashback to GCSE days

After a lazy day spent reading and catching, I got down to cooking supper while pater helped my niece cram for her imminent GCSE maths exam. Even though she was doing the easier paper, I was surprised by how easy it was: I don't think it covered anything that I hadn't learnt by the end of my second year of senior school.

Still, the girl seemed to find it tough going. She's hoping to get a C in November, with the possibility of a re-sit in the summer if she doesn't get the grade she needs for sixth form; pater, on the other hand, is clearly if unrealistically hoping that she'll somehow find a way to study hard enough to be able to take the more difficult paper in June. Sometimes I think we — both children and grandchildren — have let him down by not being better at mathematics...

ETA: I completely forgot to mention my niece's unexpected — to me, at least — interest in philosophy. For some reason, she mentioned that some of her friends had visited Auschwitz as part of their philosophy and ethics course. I transformed this into a few comments about Kant's argument that it is always wrong to lie — something I hazily remembered Kant justifying in terms of the Categorical Imperative — and after she mentioned that she was interested in studing P&E in the Sixth Form, we went on to talk about William Paley's watchmaker argument and where it falls down.

I'm very excited by the idea of another philosopher in the family!