Book Review: Dark Pines

With dozens of Nordic thrillers making it to the shelves in the post Stieg Larsson era, you would be forgiven for mistaking Will Dean's Dark Pines to be yet another chilly tale of gory murder set in a small town. At first glance, that's what it is — an isolated, intensely claustrophobic small town of Gavrik in Sweden that becomes a venue for multiple killings. There's bloodshed, intense snow, menacing empty forests, and then people covering up dark secrets best left untold. As the gruesome murders rock the town, Tuva Moodyson, a reporter for the local newspaper, gets in the thick of the situation, and it will be up to her to walk a tight rope between exposing the truths and treating her subjects with the right amount of sensitivity. But Tuva is also unlike a lot of other female protagonists. For one, she is an outsider to the gun-toting, elk-hunting locals, and secondly, she's been deaf since she was a child, leaving her to make do with what she can — which she does. Dean devotes a lot of space to her deafness, going into details about her daily routine of having to keep her hearing aids functional, but he fails to add any fresh perspective to the Swedish setting. The murders could have occurred in the Canadian tundra for all I care and it would have still read the same. An engrossing, if predictable, slice of crime noir, Dark Pines is an uninspired effort that's more suitable for readers who have never read a similar book before.