Theorin certainly knows how to create an eerie and creepy atmosphere and of course having set his book in Sweden the long dark nights help to build the chilling tension.
This is the second of a trilogy of stories set on the Swedish island of Oland. You don’t need to have read the first story, Echoes of the Dead, but we are sure after reading this you will want to.
'The dead are our neighbours everywhere on the island, and you have to get used to it'. It is bitter mid-winter on the Swedish island of Oland, and Katrine and Joakim Westin have moved with their children to the boarded-up manor house at Eel Point. But their remote idyll is soon shattered when Katrine is found drowned off the rocks nearby. As Joakim struggles to keep his sanity in the wake of the tragedy, the old house begins to exert a strange hold over him. Joakim has never been in the least superstitious, but from where are those whispering noises coming? To whom does his daughter call out in the night? And why is the barn door for ever ajar? As the end of the year approaches, and the infamous winter storm moves in across Oland, Joakim begins to fear that the most spine-chilling story he's heard about Eel Point might indeed be true: that every Christmas the dead return...
Throughout his life, Johan Theorin has been a regular visitor to the Baltic island of Oland. His mother’s family – sailors, fishermen and farmers - have lived there for centuries, nurturing the island’s rich legacy of strange tales and folklore. A journalist by profession, Johan now lives in Gothenburg. He is currently working on his second novel, and is planning a quartet of novels all set on Oland.
Echoes from the Dead (originally published in Sweden as Skumtimmen) is Johan’s first novel. In 2007 it was voted Best First Crime Novel by the authors and critics of the Swedish Academy of Crime, and it has been sold in sixteen countries. His second novel, The Darkest Room, (in Swedish Nattfak) was voted the Best Swedish Crime Novel of 2008.
