Until Thy Wroth Be Past

[sawyl]

Skipping over the third of Åsa Larsson's Martinsson novels, which doesn't seem to be available on Amazon, I find myself at Until Thy Wroth Be Past, trying to infer the events of The Black Path for the changes in the character dynamics.

When a young woman's body is discovered trapped under ice of a northern river, it is initially assumed that she has died in a tragic diving accident. But a combination of suspicious circumstances and a dream about the woman's ghost persuades Rebecka Martinsson, now working as a prosecutor in Kiruna, that the case is worth a closer look. And sure enough, when Inspector Malle starts digging in to the dead woman's family background she discovers a whole tree of unsavoury characters and a buried secret that goes all the way back to the Second World War.

As with the other novels, Until Thy Wroth features some wonderful locations and some particularly good characters. The appalling Krekula family are particularly well drawn, with their initial almost cliched villain roles turning into subtle and nuanced portraits as the story unfolds. There are also a couple of successful changes in the main cast, with Anna-Maria at odds with Sven-Erik and beset by self-doubt after something that happened during The Black Path. The decision to make Wilma, the murder victim, the narrator works well and allows her to reveal more to the reader than is ever uncovered by Martinsson and the police.