It’s very liberating not to have to try to love everybody, thought Rebecka. [loc. 3345]
Rebecka Martinsson left Kiruna, her hometown in northern Sweden, after a scandal involving a popular pastor. She's made a successful career for herself as a lawyer: when her old friend Sanna phones to ask a favour, she immediately writes “Say no! NO!” on a Post-it. But she ends up saying 'Yes', because Sanna's brother Viktor -- also a leading light of the Church of All Our Strength -- has been brutally murdered, on holy ground.
The narrative is mostly shared between Rebecka and Anna-Maria, the pregnant police inspector who's investigating the case: there are occasional passages from other viewpoints, sometimes changing mid-scene. The story switches between the present day and the events that led to Rebecka's exile. This is a very wintry novel. It's set in February, mainly in the north of Sweden, and though the day barely brightens and the cold is brutal, we see through Rebecka's eyes the beauty of winter: the aurora twisting like a dragon in the sky, the whirling snow and the blue half-light.
I found this a well-paced crime novel, with a trio of complex and impefect women at the centre (plus Sanna's two daughters): the religious aspect was intrinsic to the story and to the characters, but there was no heavy-handed moralising. I don't read much Scandinavian crime fiction, but The Savage Altar felt original and conveyed a strong sense of culture, as well as landscape. The translation read smoothly, too, though I sometimes felt there was a surplus of adverbs.
Some words of warning: there are a couple of on-page brutal murders, and an only-just-off-page animal death which I found distressing; also mention of child sex abuse, abortion and some graphic descriptions of the corpse that sets the story in motion.
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