"Larsson", to many people, is a name synonymous with Scandi-Crime, as Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy has been responsible for breaking the style into the global consciousness. One might think, therefore, that Åsa Larsson has rather a lot to live up to. As it turns out, however, Åsa's debut novel The Savage Altar (Solstorm in the original Swedish, also known by the title of its US edition as Sun Storm) was in fact published in 2003, two years before Lisbeth Salander's first appearance. It was even translated a year before Anglophone readers got to meet Salander, but seemingly not to quite the fanfare.
Larsson's background is slightly unusual, and explains many of the plot choices in Savage Altar. Her grandfather was the Swedish Olympic skier Erik Larsson, who went on to be a Laestadian priest in the north of the country. Her father Lars was likewise a preacher, while Larsson herself trained as a taxation lawyer. As a result, we have a thriller set in the north of Sweden with a taxation lawyer investigating a religious movement. That may not sound like the most promising of beginnings, but it definitely works here.
The regions of Sweden tend not to get quite as much coverage in crime fiction as Stockholm does, although there are some notable exceptions. Henning Mankell, for example, has Wallander at least based near Ystad in the south, while Mons Kallentoft features the Linköping area quite prominently. In stark contrast to the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan Stockholm, the regions tend to be much more rural and perhaps even inward-looking than the capital does, and this plays well for a novelist who can capture that mood. Larsson's vision of the north is bleak, with dark winter days and massive snowdrifts dominating the plot here - Scandinavia writ large, I feel.
Savage Altar is a remarkably restrained novel, with only one murder setting the plot into motion. We're introduced to the victim - religious celebrity Viktor Strandgård - as he is killed in the middle of the megachurch he works for, and while there are threats made and a very menacing atmosphere promising more murders, none actually happen. For a debut novel, this is quite striking, as it's very easy to bathe a plot in blood and gore if the excitement flags slightly.
Larsson's investigator character is Rebecka Martinsson, a young tax lawyer working in Stockholm but born in the northern town of Kiruna. The victim's sister Sanna is an old friend, who contacts her for help as the media picks up on the story. Martinsson travels to Kiruna and gradually finds herself drawn back into a complex web of relationships and history that she'd hoped to leave by moving south for her studies. Her connections to Sanna and Viktor, for example, are anything but straightforward, and are relayed in flashbacks at key moments in the plot.
We are also given a parallel view of the police investigating the case, particularly the heavily-pregnant Anna-Maria Mella, her second-in-command Sven-Erik Stålnacke and their reviled chief prosecutor Carl von Post. While the focus is squarely on the Rebecka Martinsson side of the plot, the police are well-drawn characters and it will be interesting to see if they continue to make appearances later in the Rebecka Martinsson series. Significantly, this is one of the few Scandi-Crime novels (aside, perhaps, from the aforementioned Millennium series) in which the police are seen as a nuisance and a difficulty, rather than unequivocally a force for good.
The murder investigation unfolds in a way which can only really be compared to the "village cosy" murder mysteries of the Golden Age. Practically everyone involved in the megachurch has something to hide, and the revelation of how and why the crime was committed ties together a number of these secrets in a surprising way. Were it not for the oppressive winter, the general sense of foreboding (and probably the reliance on emails and phones), one could almost see Miss Marple handling at least parts of this investigation. The results may have been slightly different, though.
Larsson has achieved a very successful drawing of a small community with its secrets. There are frequent explanations that characters knew that all was not well because of what wasn't being said, in that way that only a small town can really achieve. That said, it's also very clear that she has a deep love for the north of her country, with some very evocative scenes of the Aurora Borealis and even the tranquility of deep snowdrifts turning up in the middle of the more tense passages.
The quirk of having two of the central characters (Sanna and Rebecka) being slightly less than "reliable" is an interesting one. Sanna is described as "fragile" early on, and exactly what role she has played in events is still a relatively open question as the novel ends. For her part, Rebecka isn't the detached investigator most crime fiction features - she's in this quite deeply even as the novel begins, and many of her attempts to find out the truth are stymied by her connections to the witnesses, suspects and victim.
In lesser hands, this would become very complicated and probably an excuse for either the police to swoop in and solve everything or the rather hackneyed everyone-gets-kidnapped-by-the-murderer scene, but this isn't how Savage Altar plays. The climactic revelation scene does hew relatively closely to the customary thriller tropes of victory being pulled from the jaws of defeat, but such revelation as there is comes as rather a surprise. It's not a complete blindside, but certainly a surprise.
The "religious" and "tax" themes here do turn up every now and again. Most of the Kiruna characters have the ability to quote scripture quite easily, and a slight elision of one passage provides an important clue. While this is slightly unusual, particularly in light of the relatively secular Swedish society these days, it is in keeping with the rural setting.
Larsson's expertise in the Swedish tax code comes through as she begins to uncover part of the motive, too. Financial thrillers can be relatively dull in this regard (see Michael Ridpath's earlier work as a good example), but the scene in which Martinsson confronts one of the suspects with allegations of financial impropriety is spellbinding. She fairly spits her accusations at her target, and these are intercut with flashbacks to her previous interactions with this person. A scene like this is crying out to be filmed, frankly.
I genuinely can't recommend this one enough. Åsa Larsson has written a debut novel which many more experienced writers would have difficulty writing over the length of a career. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye out for a copy of her followup.
Unreservedly recommended. Five stars.
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