Tuva Moodyson Mystery Series 3 Books Collection Set By Will Dean (Dark Pines, Red Snow, Black River)

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I enjoyed the setting of small town Sweden and the procession of creepy eccentrics lined up as possible culprits. The atmosphere is dark and unsettling and the tension grows steadily with a good, solid ending.

Well, apparently I am in the minority here. I never found my way into the story. I also never connected to Tuva. To be honest, I did not like her. I found her actions and investigations quite stupid. Dark Pines, the first novel in the series, is being adapted by screenwriter and award-winning playwright Charlotte Jones (The Halcyon, Without You) into a six-part returning crime thriller series with “an iconic heroine at its heart: the thrillingly modern, utterly original, deaf journalist Tuva Moodyson.” Secondly this enables Dean to give an English perspective on some some quirks of language (he is particularly fond of examining the expression “he has a nice economy”), the menacing countryside captured in the book’s title and the hunting based local society. This outside/English based perspective is given some fictional resonance by having his main protagonist as something of an outsider herself – a Swede who lived in England (as an intern at the Guardian no less) and has had the chance to examine her own country’s cultural assumptions and linguistic quirks, and a natural City dweller and internationalist wary of the countryside and insular society in which she now lives. The main suspects just happen to live on a gravel road which leads out of town. Their houses are all nicely lined up so these characters are easy to remember. This is a very easy story to get into, nicely paced, short chapters, interesting characters in, what seems to be, a very interesting part of Sweden. There are a lot of hunters in this area, it seems it’s a rite of passage to become a man, to shoot these poor bloody elk. I didn’t really like that aspect of this story. Hunting plays a major part.Dean met his Swedish wife in his first week of university in London. An “awkward, shy, weird, bookish kid”, he’d decided to study law at London School of Economics because “that’s the thing you do if nobody in your family has been to university before – you study something that leads directly to a job”. No pattern of clues or slow revealing of mystery. This is how most crime authors would meet a word count. There'd be clues that uncovered more mystery but also more clues. There'd be things we're all trying to work out. There'd be questions which seemed like they were answered but then turned out not to be. But oh no, there's no time for that here because we have descriptions of Thai food filling our protgraginist's belly as well as descriptions of some of the racist customers who frequent the Thai food place, because you know... everyone in Sweden is racist.

Slow start, adequate prose, nice characters and descriptive passages. Improves as the author gains confidence. Tuva Moodyson is now on my list of favourite characters- no doubt about that! After leaving London to help her mother, Tuva finds herself working in a small town newspaper office as a reporter. Tuva is deaf – though she can hear with the use of hearing aids. I love how she switches off her hearing aids when she wants to shut out the world. I also loved that she was determined that her hearing impairment doesn’t define her. I suspect there is a lot more for the reader to learn about this character, especially relating to her life in London as we really only scratch the surface – Eeeek! I can’t wait! I have read all the compelling Tuva Moodyson thrillers by Will Dean and am always glad to learn there is a new addition to the series. Tuva is an engaging character. She is a deaf newspaper reporter working in small towns in the north of Sweden. We feel the cold chill in the remote area, surrounded by dark forests where wolves and elk abound, and the nearby marshes and Snake River. She belongs to too many minorities to be a bad person, even if does have no journalistic integrity whatsoever and wants to abandon her dying mother. Does the Sami thing come into the story at all? No. It's just mentioned once and then forgotten like every other would-be interesting point of this story.The farm is inhabited with a group of survivalists who live and work on a farm preparing to isolate themselves from the outside world. They are preppers who believe the end of the world is nigh. A woman who worked in the cafe here has gone missing. Tuva gets involved with this case and the more she becomes immersed in the ways of the farm, well, she is in more danger than she realises. Lars told me once that his TV is his best friend and his broadband connection is his family, especially in the winter months. He said they keep him going. TV and coffee and alcohol: the holy trinity of cold countries. Rose Ayling-Ellis said: “ I can’t wait to get started on Tuva! As soon as I read Charlotte’s scripts and then dived further into Will’s books, I just knew this was a role I wanted to play and a world I wanted to explore! It’s especially exciting for me to bring this to life alongside other deaf characters. This is a dream team to work with and I’ve no doubts this will be a story that everyone will enjoy!” Rather than it just being a copycat pastiche of the many impressive Scandi crime novels out there, it turns out that Dean himself has left the U.K. and now lives in Sweden, so has some real experience to draw upon.

As for characters…this book was RICH with some fantastic, well developed characters that had me curious throughout! I wanted to know EVERYTHING about them – and Will Dean did not disappoint. I will mention just a few though as I think this is the type of book where you have to EXPERIENCE everything and my own views may differ from others.Bad Apples is noir at its very best… If you like “heart in your mouth” reads that will keep you up all night with all the lights on, then this is for you.’ I will absolutely never be tired of the Tuva Moodyson series, and I LOVED this newest installment of the series. While this book can definitely be read as a standalone do be aware that it references a lot of content from the previous books, but it doesn’t name any names in terms of who did what.

THE AUTHOR: Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. He was a bookish, daydreaming kid who found comfort in stories and nature (and he still does). After studying Law at the LSE, and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden. He built a wooden house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it's from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. Firstly it avoided the need for translation - so not distracting the prolific but still clear overly in demand Wymondham based Don Bartlett from completing the translation of Knausgaard's My Struggle into English.Further Tuva has additional complexities to her character: her fear of the wild; the loss of her father and the longer lasting repercussions of that, including the impact it has on her victim’s family-sensitive approach to journalism; her ever present guilt over the conflict between her career ambitions and her need to look after her mother – which lead her to uneasy short and long term compromises (including her very move to a small Swedish town) which fail to satisfy either requirement – and some quirks (mainly wine gums and gaming). Dean is not deaf himself, and doesn’t understand why Tuva, who has now appeared in three crime novels, with more to follow, came to him in that way. “I wish I understood these things better. Maybe it’s a subconscious thing, and I had gleaned that I hadn’t seen many deaf characters,” he says. He still researches extensively into life with hearing loss, and says he was “worried and concerned” about how deaf readers would receive Tuva. When a deaf reader tells him his writing feels authentic, it means everything to him. And across both are laid a local strip club (and former brothel) and rumours of the activities of a high-stakes poker group – all of which emerge to Tuva and the reader as possible clues to the resolution of the new series of murders that are striking the town – all it seems of family-men hunters and all mutilated for their eyes.