Published 19th August 2021 by Zaffre.
From the cover of the book:
You can always go home. But you can never go back . . .Summer 1983: Four-year-old Billy chases a rabbit in the fields behind his house. But when his mother goes to call him in, Billy has disappeared. Never to be seen again.
Today: Veronica is a bereavement counsellor. She's never fully come to terms with her mother's suicide after her brother Billy's disappearance. When a young man walks into her group, he looks familiar and talks about the trauma of his friend's disappearance in 1983. Could Billy still be alive after all this time?
Needing to know the truth, Veronica goes home - to the place where her life started to fall apart.
But is she really prepared for the answers that wait for her there?
**************************
Anders de la Motte's first Seasons Quartet novel, Rites of Spring, is the best Scandi thriller I have read in ages (review here), so this second standalone in the series, End of Summer, has been in my sights for months.
As in the first book, the story is made up of two interconnected timelines. The first is set in the Summer of 1983, when four-year-old Billy Nilsson goes missing from his farm in the small rural town of Reftinge, and follows both the course of the police investigation into his disappearance, and the impact his assumed abduction has on his family and neighbours. Although the guilty party is never identified many believe that local man Tommy Rooth is the man with blood on his hands, taking Billy as as act of retribution against Billy's Uncle Harrald. The Nilssen family are destroyed by the events of that night and Billy's mother ends up taking her own life, leaving behind a grieving husband, a son Mattias, and a daughter Vera.
The second timeline is set twenty years later and is the driving force behind the book, as it follows Billy's sister Vera, now living in Stockholm under the name of Veronica Lindh, where she works as a bereavement counsellor. Vera has never recovered from the events that followed the disappearance of her younger brother and her mother's suicide, instead she has found solace in allowing anger to fuel her rebellious nature and a yearning to leave the countryside behind. Her path has been a rocky one, and the fallout from a recent disastrous love affair has raised the head of many of the demons that haunt her still.
Her attempts to get her life back on track are knocked sideways by the appearance of a new face at one of her counselling sessions. A young man calling himself Isak Sjöllin tells the group that he needs help coming to terms with the abduction of his best friend many years ago, speaking in a way that hints the missing friend may have been Billy. Something about this man is familiar to Vera, and his story brings the past rushing back with a force that sets her reeling. But it's not until she sees a photofit speculating what Billy may look like now that she begins to question what she thought she knew about the past. Engaging the help of Mattias, who is now a police investigator, she starts to look into the case of her missing brother, trying to find out all she can about Isak at the same time, and she is soon convinced that something is a bit off about what she has been told. Could Isak in fact be Billy back from the dead, and why is someone following her? The only way to get some answers is to head back to Reftinge to do some digging - and the locals, led by Uncle Harald, are unlikely to be happy about it.
End of Summer is every bit as gripping as Rites of Spring. Yet again, Anders de la Motte has crafted an intelligent and complex tale that drags you in from the first page, misdirects you at every turn, and keeps you on the edge of your seat until the corker of an ending. This is a twisty tale full of delicious secrets and lies, and de la Motte builds an intense atmosphere ripe with menacing undertones, which elicit feelings of real jeopardy throughout - especially when set against my very favourite of backdrops, a small town where everyone knows your business... or at least think they do... and there is never any smoke with a whole blazing inferno!
There are some really lovely strains to this story, which wind through the claustrophobic tension with a subtlety that is very impressive for a translated work - kudos to the translator Neil Smith for pulling this off so well. Themes of doomed love, guilt, suspicion, intimidation, escape and revenge are ever present, reflected in the stories of many of the characters here, and de la Motte explores the convoluted dynamics of small communities and dysfunctional families beautifully.
This is seriously breath-taking thriller writing, as engaging as it is claustrophobic in the way only a Scandi yarn can be. I could not put it down, racing through the pages in the same way as I did with the first book in the Seasons Quartet. All praise to Zaffre for introducing the UK to such an accomplished in-translation author. I cannot wait for the next instalment!
End of Summer is available now in ebook, paperback and audio formats, from your favourite book retailer.
Many thanks to Kelly Rose Smith at Zaffre Books for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review. I also bought a paperback copy.
About the author:
To date, the first three books in the 'Seasons Quartet' have published over half a million copies, with the fourth, Rites of Spring, publishing in Sweden in 2020. Set in southern Sweden, all four books can be read as standalones.
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