Slow start builds to a great read

Echoes from the Dead, by Johan Theorin (Random House, RRP $36.99):

This was one of those books that managed to surprise me.

That surprise didn’t come as a result of a twisty plot (although it certainly had one of those) but because after the first couple of chapters I was beginning to think I’d picked a dud to read.

Fast forward a couple more and I was hooked, pulled into a story that jumped backwards and forwards in time and managed to make both stories run smoothly.

More than 20 years ago, a little boy disappeared from a small Swedish island. No trace of him was ever found and that loss has haunted his mother ever since.

Now, the boy’s grandfather is on the trail of the true story of just what might have happened to the boy and he and his daughter begin a quest to find the truth.

The clues point to Nils Kant, the island’s dirty little secret: a man who died while in self-imposed exile and hiding from the law after killing a cop.

But Kant died during the 1960s, well before Julia’s son disappeared.

The story has plenty of action and red herrings but in the end the whole plot comes together to culminate in a logical, but still exciting, conclusion.

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