A church in the glittering frozen wastes of northern Sweden. Inside, a sacrifice: the body of a man – slashed to pieces, hands severed, eyes gouged out.
The victim’s sister is first to discover the body and she soon finds herself the police’s only suspect. Terrified and confused, she calls on an old friend: hot-shot city lawyer Rebecka Martinsson.
Can Rebecka dig beneath the surface of the community that she once fled, and find the truth? 

IN A NUTSHELL
Wow, what a book!
An excellent read: vivid, intense, strong characters. a deep sense of place.
A thriller deeply rooted in the reality of a small arctic community. 
Rebecka Martison is a wonderful creation. 
AND THIS WAS A DEBUT NOVEL. What do you do for an encore?
I’ll be reading the next book in the series to find out.

 ‘The Savage Altar‘ had everything I look for in Nordic Noir. It was compelling, distinctive, grimly realistic and endlessly surprising.  It pulled me in from the first, graphicly violent page. The characters are vividly drawn. The two main women, the lawyer (Rebecka Martinsson) and the (heavily pregnant) police detective are strong, confident but not untroubled.  Both have male bosses that are easy to despise. The local prosecutor is a man whose sense of entitlement vastly exceeds his talent. Rebecka’s boss, a Senior Partner in the law firm, is a predatory, alcoholic narcissist who still sees himself as one of the good guys.  It all seemed realistic to me.

I became more and more engaged with the book as it went along. I got pulled in by a strong sense of the place and by the flawed people with tangled, painfull-to-rememver pasts who lived there, .The murder mystery added urgency and stress that pushed to the fore arrogant men that I enjoyed despising as they demonstrated the truth of who they are.

I thought the story was made stronger by Rebecka’s reluctance to get involved. She doesn’t see herself as a hero but she can’t bring herself to abandon people she once knew. I watched her sinking deeper into a situation that kept getting worse. It was a situation that made her reflect on who she was when she lived so far north, who she has become as she pursured her prestigious career in Stockholm and who she wants to be.

The midsection of the book was filled with anger and almost none of it is directly about the murder. The opeining scene was bloody and violent but almost bloodless by comparison the rage that Rebecka and some of the people around her feel. At the same time, there are some wonderful images of kindeess and hsppiness that feel like a warm hearth to shelter from the storm of anger the murder has unleashed.

By the last quarter, the book had built up so much momentum that I stayed up deep into the night to finish it. It wasn’t just that I wanted to see what happened. I wanted to see the people who caused it to happen receive their punishment.

I had a great time with this book. I’m not at all surprised to find that it won the Swedish Crime Writers’ Association Prize for best debut novel. I’ve already downloaded a copy of the next book, ‘The Blood Spilt‘ and I’ve promised myself that I’ll read it this month.

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