William's Reviews > Black River

4.5 stars - Very good

Tuva is much more vulnerable and distraught here, and dispossessed as she's only back in town to search. As always, Dean's characters are fascinating, distinct and memorable, it's perhaps the best quality of the Tuva series. Pacing is quite good throughout most of the book, although some sections drag a bit.

As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.


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Tuva desperately searches for her friend, suspecting several people to no avail, following leads and eventually stumbling upon something totally unexpected.

The climax is intense, and superb. A wonderful addition to the Tuva Moodyson series.

Tuva's new Toyota Hilux
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Quotes and notes:

There’s a strawberry stall in the lay-by outside McDonald’s. Two girls who can’t be older than fifteen wearing cotton dresses and bored faces, two girls sitting on fold-up camp chairs behind a fold-up decorator’s table, two girls selling overpriced Swedish strawberries to Swedes who crave them and will pay almost anything to get them. Swedes buy Swedish. The table is red and the girls are dressed in white and the sky behind is a powder blue. The whole thing looks like the horizontal block-stripes of an artist; the kind some swear is a philistine and others laud as a genius.
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I brush my teeth and feel about a hundred times better. Strange how toothpaste can lift your mood. I made an effort to brush Mum’s teeth right up until the end. Softly. Hardly any pressure at all. Her lips were dark by then and they were sore. Her gums were prone to bleeding. But the toothpaste perked her up a little each time. That’s mint for you. And it was one tiny thing I could do for her. Not medical, just a simple everyday human routine. One of my hands supporting the back of her head, the other brushing as gently as I could manage. Me and her. Mother and child.
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I leave my bag by the door, blow out the candle and climb into bed. I have no pillow alarm so I sleep with my phone under my pillow and set the alarm for seven and make sure it’s on vibrate mode. I remove my aids. I have no desiccant but they’re dry. It’s June. Everything’s dry. Dark rooms are unsettling. Especially once I’ve removed my hearing aids. I don’t think of myself as a vulnerable person, but that only applies to daytime. The darkness is not my friend. I fear it.
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A group of kids wait in an orderly Swedish queue to have bloodsucking ticks removed from behind their ears and their necks and their ankles by a short-haired woman wielding a pair of steel tweezers and a magnifying glass.
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The area they’ve already felled is clear. There is no forest here. But that doesn’t make it easy to navigate without falling and breaking my pelvis. There are trunks everywhere. Trunks and dead branches stripped weeks ago from freshly cut pine and discarded like cut hair in a salon. The stacks of branches are a metre deep in places. Hidden traps. Imagine all the snakes down there. Vipers. Rats as big as furry newborn babies. Streamlined, rabid, with fur and sharp protruding teeth and tails as long as violin bows. Arachnid nests right under my boots. Spiders and centipedes, the Jurassic variety that could swallow your cocker spaniel in the depths of the night. I try not to stumble. I couldn’t imagine being stranded out here. Injured and helpless.
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There are treetops in the distance. I can’t see the Norwegian spruce trees themselves but I can see their tops. They shake. A treetop moves and chainsaws scream. I hear the sound of living wood cracking, and then the treetop sways to one side and disappears. Like this whole place is a church on a Sunday morning. Everyone standing for a hymn and then, at the far end of the nave, during the most climactic part of the song, an elder faints from the heat. You don’t see him fall, just his head sway, and then he disappears from view.
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The door swings open. ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘What is it?’ asks Sally. There’s a horizontal table with thick leather loops at each corner and a hole in the centre. There’s a stainless steel chair on the left with chains hung over the back of it. Integrated built-in phallus. A camera bolted to the wall on a pivoting arm. On the far wall is a rack of whips and riding crops all neat in a row like a gardener might store her rakes and hoes. ‘It’s…’ I pause. ‘Some kind of sex room. A dungeon.’ ‘A sex what?’ she says, snatching the binoculars from me. ‘Hey, now…’ I say. ‘Holy shitting mother of a godless age,’ says Sally. ‘What kind of perversions…’



Will Dean

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