The Living and the Dead by Christoffer Carlsson Translator: Rachel Willson-Broyles
Series: Halland Suite #3
Published by Hogarth Press on December 2, 2025 (first published April 21, 2023)
Source: NetGalley
Genres: Mystery
Pages: 411
Format: eARC
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Small towns sometimes have a voice of their own.
On a snowy winter night in 1999, Sander and Killian leave a house party together outside a small town in rural Sweden. The very best of friends, the two seventeen-year-olds imagine they will remain so forever. But by the next morning, a corpse is found in the trunk of a car, and each boy is a suspect in the murder. Each has something they want to conceal from the police. And from the other.
The hunt for the killer will take more than twenty years. It will see the lead detective leave the force forever. And it won’t end until a second body turns up in similar circumstances, and the tight-knit community’s secrets are finally brought to light.
In The Living and the Dead, renowned criminologist Christoffer Carlsson masterfully transports us to the fields and forests of western Sweden, a region of farmers and truck drivers torn apart by economic injustice and self-deceit—a world where the portal between the living and the dead is flung wide open and where no one is entirely innocent.
In a small, remote town in Sweden, two eighteen year-old boys leave a party only to discover the next day that one of their friends has been found murdered in the trunk of a car. Each of the boys is a suspect, but the case is never solved. Twenty years later, another man is killed and old secrets are uncovered.
It took me a while to get into this one. A lot of the names are unfamiliar to me, which can make the characters and places more difficult to keep track of. We had several points of view with the detectives and boys which worked well in the long run, but made it harder to connect to the characters at first. The story also takes place over twenty years and it takes a while before some of the scenes tie in with the rest.
At some point, though, the story had me hooked. The plot is multi-layered and so many of the characters are holding on to their own, and each other’s, secrets. It’s a small town where alliances, jealousies, and connections all run deep. It’s a town where some people dream of leaving and others can’t imagine living anywhere else. It was interesting to see how what happened that night and that week affected those involved, the teenagers, their parents, even the detectives originally on the case.
The characters are our focus here, more than the plot. The mysteries are solved, but it’s the characters’ actions, how they’ve coped, the choices they make, that guide the book.
About Christoffer Carlsson
Christoffer Carlsson was born in 1986 on the west coast of Sweden. He holds a PhD in criminology from the University of Stockholm and is one of Sweden’s leading crime experts. Carlsson is the youngest winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, voted by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy, and has won the prestigious Glass Key award, given to the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
I love deeply character driven thrillers and all that snow is a bonus.