This is a novel of a (very boring) crime.

I feel bad rating this book so low, but it’s just incredibly dry and not interesting.

Mikael is killed on a winter night in 1999. Years later, a teen goes missing from another rural Swedish village, and years after that, Mikael’s bother, Filip, is killed in an eerily similar fashion. How are the three teens connected, if at all? What really happened in 1999? These are the questions that plague the small area police force as they try to piece everything together.

Christoffer Carlsson’s The Living and the Dead reads a lot differently than American thriller novels. The beginning especially feels more like a piece of investigative journalism or a documentary than it does a fictional thriller. The writing is drier and much less intense than what I went in expecting. Instead of focusing much on the characters it’s more of a this happened, and then this, and then this, sort of vibe. We get from point A to B but without any of the intrigue.

There’s a lot of skipping around of characters throughout the novel, although it feels more jarring in the beginning. As well as skipping around points-of-view, it skips around with the timeline as well, which left me feeling unmoored. The time jumps get much better as the novel progresses and things start moving more chronologically. Somehow, this also means that we get a lot of chapters in the middle that add up to just about nothing. They’re not necessary to the plot and while they sort of flesh out the characters more, I just wasn’t interested. It didn’t make the characters any more dynamic and frankly, it’s not what I come to a thriller looking for.

Which takes me back to the fact that this book just isn’t compelling. Many of the chapters and characters are irrelevant. At times it felt like things were just being added to give a twist later on, but they just weren’t very twisty. I honestly couldn’t care less to find out who killed Mikael because it just didn’t feel like any of the characters cared either. I didn’t find any of them compelling, and the crime was laid out in such dry terms and without speculation, that I just wasn’t very interested.

All-in-all, I’d give this book a pass unless you’re looking for a glacially paced thriller.

I really try to like the Scandinavian crime genre, but there is just something that I cannot connect with. Everything seems so clinical and detached in the stories.