In the first thaw of spring the body of a young woman surfaces in the River Torne in the far north of Sweden. 

Rebecka Martinsson is working as a prosecutor in nearby Kiruna, her sleep troubled by visions of a shadowy, accusing figure. Could the body belong to the girl in her dream? 

Joining forces with Police Inspector Anna-Maria Mella, Martinsson will need all her courage to face a killer who will kill again to keep the past buried under half a century of silent ice and snow.

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Until Thy Wrath Be Past’ was the best book so far in the Rebecka Martinsson series. The storytelling was accomplished, the mystery was engaging and the development of the core cast of characters was convincing.

The most remarkable thing was Larsson’s ability to generate empathy at a deep level: for the person killed, for the investigators and, most surprisingly, for the killer.

‘Until Thy Wrath Be Past‘ (2008) is the fourth Rebecka Martinsson book and I think it’s the best one yet. With each book, the writing has become more adventurous and more accomplished. These are novels that are less about a mystery and more about showing the origins of deadly violence and its impact on the people involved.

Åsa Larsson starts to tell this story from the point of view of the spirit of a young woman who has been murdered and is sticking around to see if anyone is going to learn what happened to her and hold her killer(s) to account. This was so skillfully done that it seemed right, rather than strange to be hearing from the young woman’s spirit. Who would be better placed to understand what had been taken from her?

The storytelling included many of the things I expect in a police procedural: interviews, evidence gathering, the slow revelation of who did what to whom and moments of violence and threat. Yet it doesn’t read as a police procedural. Its focus was less on the puzzle and more on the emotions and experiences of the people involved. The storytelling seamlessly blended action, memory and emotion. Adding the memories and emotions of the dead young women felt like a natural extension of the storytelling style.

The mystery was engaging. I liked that the roots of the violence went all the way back to World War II. I knew, almost from the beginning. how and where the young was killed. The rest of the novel provided the Why and the By Whom in a satisfying way.

Although Rebecka Martinsson is a key character in the series, she is often not centre stage. Her role is less to be an investigator and more to be a sort of empathic interpreter of the meaning of events. In this book, Rebecka again n finds herself at the heart of the action but what places her there is her insight into people rather than a systematic investigation. The traumas inflicted on Rebecka by the events in the previous books have left her mental health a little fragile. Leaving Stockholm and returning to her cottage in the far north where she was raised by her grandmother, has opened up memories and emotions for Rebecka that are reshaping her life. So, having a dead girl appear in her dreams, didn’t seem that far away from the rest of her daily life.

Real police investigation isn’t ignored in this book. The police team, led by Inspector Anna-Maria Mella, did a thorough job. Anna-Maria and her team are part of the core cast of characters in these books. I liked that they and their relationships with each other keep developing in believable ways. 

For me, the most remarkable thing about ‘Until Thy Wrath Be Past’ was Åsa Larsson’s ability to generate empathy at a deep level: for the person killed, for the investigators and, most surprisingly, for the killer. The vibrancy of the murdered young woman is vivid. The grief of her grandmother felt real and raw. The killer was drawn not as a monster but as someone shaped by all the things that had happened in their life to bring them to the point where they became a killer.

It was a book I was sad to finish.