The Summer of Kim Novak

In this brilliant Swedish thriller and sensitive coming-of-age story, a traumatic event shatters the summer of two boys in love with their young teacher.

Sweden in the '60s. Erik and his friend Edmund spend their vacation by a forest lake daydreaming about Ewa, a young substitute teacher with an uncanny resemblance to the actress Kim Novak. The boys are having the time of their lives until a shocking discovery disrupts their world. Twenty-five years later, Erik comes across a newspaper article about unsolved crimes and is overwhelmed by memories and questions from that summer of his youth. What actually happened back then? The Summer of Kim Novak has all the tension and mystery of Nesser's world-famous thrillers, combined with a coming-of-age tale of remarkable psychological precision.

At the start of this moving elegy for lost innocence from Nesser (the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries), 49-year-old Erik, the book's narrator, promises to tell the reader about 'a terrible and tragic event' that occurred the summer he was 14. In 1962, as Erik's mother is dying of cancer, his grieving father sends the boy to the family's ramshackle lake cabin with 14-year-old Edmund, a fellow student Erik hardly knows, and Erik's older brother, a reporter who intends to write the Great Swedish Novel that summer. After a lazy month of swimming and fantasising, handball champion Berra Albertsson is found dead in a gravel parking spot near where the boys are staying, his skull caved in, and his fiancée, Ewa Kaludis, the boys' substitute teacher and the object of their dreams, is a suspect. Erik and Edmund embark on a protracted murder investigation that leads them into the mysteries of sex. Nesser sensitively probes the agonies and ecstasies of adolescence, making this an exquisite example of Nordic noir's ability to reveal the darkest emotional depths beneath a cloudless summer sky. Publishers Weekly, starred review