TIS A HARD TALE
Just finished another novel by Camilla Lackberg called The Stonecutter.
The action is once again centered in the seaside Swedish
town of Fjallbacka where the
semi-functional police department labors to solve the death of a seven year old
girl. We open on the finding of a body
in the sea and then shift to 1923 where a stonecutter in a local quarry finds
himself in a sexual relationship with the conniving daughter of his boss.
Lackberg alternates these two seemingly disconnected and
time separated events until they coalesce in the present for the surprising
finish. Almost immediately in the
present day plot we discover that the young girl did drown, but the water in
her lungs was fresh thus pointing to a murder rather than an accident. The lead
investigator, Dectective Patrick Hedstrom, struggles to find a motive for the killing
and while doing so we meet up with a ragged assortment of dysfunctional
families—including his own. This may be
socialized Eden Sweden, but the suspects
all suffer from a broad gallery of physical ills and psychic disturbances
ranging from extreme religious conservatism and autism to child beating and
pedophilia. Under the idyllic exterior
sits a seething caldron of dystopic fury.
Initially it is hard to see how the title of the book fits
into the murder investigation, but slowly you do begin to see that the stories
of the multiple families all demonstrate what happens when hardened attitudes
rule. Stone has no give; it must be
hammered and split. In Lackberg’s world human
behavior hardens to rock and when it breaks it releases unforgiving cruelty, vengeance, and violence. Her villains seem to have monsters locked
in their skulls and the victims pay and
pay by suffering at first and then returning the suffering to new generations.
Put this together with the cold bleak Nordic landscape and
you have a chilling story that is only partially redeemed by the discovery of
how important parental love is to the family and the body politic.
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