After She’s Gone is rightly called a Crime Novel but it’s rather more layered than that. Letting the story unfold through the different, sometimes overlapping, viewpoints of three very different characters gives the reader three different ways of understanding the lives of the people who live in a remote small town whose industry has died and whose dwindling population has to deal with the community of Muslim immigrants housed among them. The claustrophobia is increased by the grip of the Swedish winter which makes every movement more difficult and blurs evidence.
The story begins with a ‘cold case’. Ironically appropriate for the time of year. The investigation of a child’s death leads to a re-evaluation of the nature of the town in which everyone seems trapped. The characters of the three narrators also emerge: each has his or her distinctive voice and each is in some way an outsider. How far they separately come to understand or live with that status is tied closely to the revelations of the investigation. The plot twists in ways which at first seem random, and finally reveal the truth with a clarity which the narrators must find his or her own way to accept.
This is gripping reading and first class writing. Camilla Grebe has written a satisfyingly complex crime story with characters who draw the reader into their lives.
Read it.
Review by Penny Deacon, author of A Kind of Puritan and A Thankless Child
After She’s Gone by Camilla Grebe published by Zaffre, 21st March 2019. Hardback and eBook £18.99