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A review by fictionfan
The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin
3.0
Who ya gonna call?
Joakim and Katrine Westin have come to live on Öland with their two young children, in a house built at Eel Point where twin lighthouses stand, one still operational, the other now deserted. The house was built long ago by the man responsible for the construction of the lighthouses, and he used the timbers from a deadly shipwreck. This is seen as bad luck, and the house has its own history of tragedies which will slowly be revealed to us through a journal Katrine’s mother has sent her. She too had once lived in the house at Eel Point with her own mother, whose paintings of the blizzards that afflict the coast in winter have become posthumously famous and valuable. When Joakim returns from a final trip to their old house in Stockholm to pick up the last of their stuff, he learns that Katrine has drowned, having apparently slipped from the rocks below the lighthouses. Meantime, there are three men who are systematically burgling the houses left empty for the winter by summer visitors, but they’ve now decided that the pickings will be better from inhabited houses…
I’ve loved two of the four books in this quartet, The Voices Beyond and Echoes from the Dead. (The first four books are still being listed as a quartet, even though Theorin seems to have added a fifth now.) One of Theorin’s main strengths is his ability to use the harsh weather conditions and isolation of the island to create a creepy, tense atmosphere, and he certainly does that again in this one. There are parts that truly deserve to be called spine-tingling. However in this one, unlike the other two, he introduces the supernatural – Eel Point is full of ghosts, and not metaphorical ones. You’re either a person who can go along with the idea of ghosts existing, or you’re not. I’m not, not in contemporary fiction anyway, so sadly this book didn’t work for me as well as the others did.
It’s as much about Joakim’s grief as it is a mystery about Katrine’s death, though the mystery element does come more to the fore towards the end. It’s well written, and gives a real sense of the bleakness of life here during the harshest months of winter, even today with modern heating and communication methods. The flashbacks via the journal show how much harder things were when the winters led to almost complete isolation. The almost total darkness that lasts for months and the occasional severe blizzards have taken their toll in human life, and shipwrecks have left their mark on the coast and its people.
The grief motif is never my favourite – I prefer rather more cheerful murder mysteries! But it’s done credibly, and the book takes place over a long enough timescale for us to see Joakim and the kids begin the process of healing. The solution happily is grounded in reality, and the motivations of the dark crime at the heart are fully human, if perhaps a little over the credibility line. Gerlof is the character who links the quartet – an old man now living in an assisted living facility who has lived all his life on the island, and knows some of the dark secrets of its history. This one also features his great-niece, Tilda, who has come to the island as a rookie cop, and we see the particular challenges of that task in such a bleak, isolated spot. The two strands – Katrine’s death and the burglaries – will eventually come together in a rather over-dramatic thriller finale. Overall, though, there’s plenty to enjoy, especially the setting and the descriptions of the harsh conditions.
But those ghosts! Nope! When the solution of a mystery comes about through hints given by ghosts, I fear it loses me. I stuck with it to the end, although it was touch and go for the latter half. And I will probably go on to read the fourth (which is actually the third since as usual I’m reading them out of order). But I’ll check reviews first to be sure that it stays firmly in the real world. As always, my middling rating is a subjective measure of my lukewarm enjoyment, not an objective measure of quality – this is a simple case of wrong reader, wrong book. I’d happily recommend it to the many readers who don’t mind a ghostly element in crime fiction.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Joakim and Katrine Westin have come to live on Öland with their two young children, in a house built at Eel Point where twin lighthouses stand, one still operational, the other now deserted. The house was built long ago by the man responsible for the construction of the lighthouses, and he used the timbers from a deadly shipwreck. This is seen as bad luck, and the house has its own history of tragedies which will slowly be revealed to us through a journal Katrine’s mother has sent her. She too had once lived in the house at Eel Point with her own mother, whose paintings of the blizzards that afflict the coast in winter have become posthumously famous and valuable. When Joakim returns from a final trip to their old house in Stockholm to pick up the last of their stuff, he learns that Katrine has drowned, having apparently slipped from the rocks below the lighthouses. Meantime, there are three men who are systematically burgling the houses left empty for the winter by summer visitors, but they’ve now decided that the pickings will be better from inhabited houses…
I’ve loved two of the four books in this quartet, The Voices Beyond and Echoes from the Dead. (The first four books are still being listed as a quartet, even though Theorin seems to have added a fifth now.) One of Theorin’s main strengths is his ability to use the harsh weather conditions and isolation of the island to create a creepy, tense atmosphere, and he certainly does that again in this one. There are parts that truly deserve to be called spine-tingling. However in this one, unlike the other two, he introduces the supernatural – Eel Point is full of ghosts, and not metaphorical ones. You’re either a person who can go along with the idea of ghosts existing, or you’re not. I’m not, not in contemporary fiction anyway, so sadly this book didn’t work for me as well as the others did.
It’s as much about Joakim’s grief as it is a mystery about Katrine’s death, though the mystery element does come more to the fore towards the end. It’s well written, and gives a real sense of the bleakness of life here during the harshest months of winter, even today with modern heating and communication methods. The flashbacks via the journal show how much harder things were when the winters led to almost complete isolation. The almost total darkness that lasts for months and the occasional severe blizzards have taken their toll in human life, and shipwrecks have left their mark on the coast and its people.
The grief motif is never my favourite – I prefer rather more cheerful murder mysteries! But it’s done credibly, and the book takes place over a long enough timescale for us to see Joakim and the kids begin the process of healing. The solution happily is grounded in reality, and the motivations of the dark crime at the heart are fully human, if perhaps a little over the credibility line. Gerlof is the character who links the quartet – an old man now living in an assisted living facility who has lived all his life on the island, and knows some of the dark secrets of its history. This one also features his great-niece, Tilda, who has come to the island as a rookie cop, and we see the particular challenges of that task in such a bleak, isolated spot. The two strands – Katrine’s death and the burglaries – will eventually come together in a rather over-dramatic thriller finale. Overall, though, there’s plenty to enjoy, especially the setting and the descriptions of the harsh conditions.
But those ghosts! Nope! When the solution of a mystery comes about through hints given by ghosts, I fear it loses me. I stuck with it to the end, although it was touch and go for the latter half. And I will probably go on to read the fourth (which is actually the third since as usual I’m reading them out of order). But I’ll check reviews first to be sure that it stays firmly in the real world. As always, my middling rating is a subjective measure of my lukewarm enjoyment, not an objective measure of quality – this is a simple case of wrong reader, wrong book. I’d happily recommend it to the many readers who don’t mind a ghostly element in crime fiction.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com