Book review: Macabre story from the deep by Tove Alsterdal

Short chapters told from the point of view of each of the characters bring the reader through a series of convincing plot twists to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion in  'Deep Harbour'

Tove Alsterdal: Riveting novel concerning draft-dodging US soldiers in Sweden and events of 50 years later. File picture: Annika Marklund

• Deep Harbour 
• Tove Alsterdal 
• Translated by Alice Menzies 
• Faber, €14.99

This taut, well-constructed thriller grabs the reader’s attention from the start and does not let it go until the very end, a satisfying 370 pages later. 

It opens at 5am in late April as a professional diver, Ylva, is about to go down 18m in the Baltic sea: “The water was the colour of unfermented beer, sediment swirling in the fast-flowing current, and she could feel the chill, despite her thick drysuit.” 

Exploring a wreck, perhaps 100 years old, she discovers a human skull, half submerged in the sludge.

This is the key that unlocks a long and complicated story, spanning two generations of locals in the small town, Kramsfors, on the mighty Angermanland river in the Arctic circle, and two American deserters among the thousands who took refuge in Sweden in 1968.

Tove Alsterdal is a naturally gifted story-teller and the most complicated entanglements are made clear, so that there is no need to have read the earlier novels.

The main character, the 35-year-old police officer Eira Sjödin is pregnant as the story begins, and not sure who is the father — her long-term on/off lover Ricken, an unconventional loner, a free spirit and a childhood friend of her troubled brother Magnus, or a younger colleague, August, with an impeccably politically-correct outlook. 

Eira is working from home, confined to desk work by sympathetic colleagues for the duration of her pregnancy, so that the exciting chases across wild, frozen countryside that were a highlight of the two earlier volumes in this series, seem unlikely.

But that is to underestimate Eira’s ability to be at the core of the action. 

She is known for her terrier-like pursuit of the most unlikely clues and her network of local contacts.

The skull discovered underwater was not, as initially thought, an accidental drowning, nor the body of Lina Stavred, a local girl who disappeared, assumed drowned, 20 years back, but turned out to belong to a young male murder victim, and to date from about 50 years ago. 

The body, with traces of a rifle shot in the back of the neck, was lashed to an anchor before being dumped in the sea.

Given a lead by a forensic pathologist, some nifty detective work by Eira, at her desk, reveals that the victim was probably one of the American draft dodgers who lived briefly in the area in 1968. 

Even stranger, he seems to have had an affair with Eira’s mother, Kirsten. Alas, Kirsten is living with Alzheimer’s, and can neither deny nor confirm this.

We learn Sweden was the only country in Europe to offer unconditional refuge to the young Americans, going AWOL from US military bases in West Germany before their turn to fight in Vietnam, or to avoid a second tour of duty. 

Ever indefatigable, Eira tracks one of them down to a record shop in Gothenburg and learns of the CIA’s involvement. The detailed research in these sections is both nostalgic and fascinating.

As her pregnancy proceeds, Eira’s neighbour, Allan Westin, an octogenarian and a former communist, keeps an eye on her, leaving his scruffy dog Rabble with her overnight so that she is not alone. 

One of the possible fathers, August, arranges a meeting between Eira and his equally open-minded fiancée to discuss possibilities of sharing childcare when the baby is born.

Short chapters told from the point of view of each of the characters bring the reader through a series of convincing plot twists to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion.

This is the final volume in the award-winning High Coast series, but no doubt Alsterdal will be back soon with some equally compelling scenario.

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