» Update your details

• Extract
• Synopsis
• Reviews
• Product details
• Interview

• Biography

Synopsis

On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies ritually mutilated and defiled – and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall.

Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the small town she’d left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm tax lawyer, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the church of the cult he helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor, and to confront the rumours circulating in a closed and frightened community.

But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark and impossible to guess...

Download and read the opening pages of Savage Altar here

Reviews

Interview

Dear Reader,

NEVER trust an author. He or she is perfectly capable of taking everything you say or do and making it into a lovely soup to serve up to his or her readers. Never let an author into your house.

Before I wrote my first book, The Savage Altar, I was visiting Lena, a good friend who lived in my old home town of Kiruna, a mining town some ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle.

I was sitting at her kitchen table one winter’s morning. She was washing up. We were chatting about this and that.

Then I caught sight of some photographs standing on a cupboard there in her kitchen. They were pictures of Lena’s children and her nieces and nephews. And in one of the photographs was her eldest son, Fredrik. It was as if an electric shock ran through me when I looked at the picture of him. He’d grown up so much. When I lived in Kiruna, he was just a little boy. But this picture showed a young man.

He’s so good looking, I thought, experiencing a real jolt at how quickly time passes, and the fact that nothing lasts forever. 

He had long, fair hair. And I knew he played the violin.

He looks like a saint, I thought.

Then I thought:

He’d make such a beautiful corpse.

Then I got the picture in my head of a young man lying there on his back in the snow, dying. It was a dark night in the middle of winter. It was cold, a biting, rasping cold. I could see his long, fair Lucia hair like a ragged, bloody halo around his head, while above him the Aurora Borealis moved across the star-studded winter sky, trailing her impressive veils of pink, green and white.

The picture stayed with me. I started to wonder who this dying young man was. Who had murdered him and why. Who would solve the murder.

I can still hardly believe that it turned into a book. I wrote it on Post-it notes and receipts, and from time to time, when I had the opportunity to use the computer at home, I wrote up all the notes I’d made. 

My only goal was to finish writing it. The idea that it might be published was completely beyond my control, and was something I hardly even dared to think about.

I hope you’ll like it. That you’ll like the biting cold of midwinter, the austerity of the people, the dogs that are so important in all my books. I hope you’ll like my police officers: pregnant Anna-Maria with her horse-face, her idle husband whom she loves in spite of everything, and all her children; her colleague Sven-Erik Stålnacke, a man of few words, with his moustache which resembles a squirrel that’s been run over. And I really hope you’ll like my main character, Rebecka Martinsson. I know she’s a little bit isolated from other people and a little bit difficult. The kind of person who works herself to death instead of asking herself how she’s feeling. But she does have her own story, a story she’s running away from. And then of course I hope you’ll like the violence. I have a weakness for shattered bones and bleeding internal organs. 
 
Love and happiness for 2008,
Åsa Larsson

PS And my friend Lena, who is the mother of Fredrik, who became my first corpse: I had to let her read the manuscript of Savage Altar after it had been accepted, so that she could give her approval of the fact that I’d murdered her son Fredrik. 

“Fine,” she said in her terse Kiruna way when she’d finished reading it. “You can publish it. But you’re not spending any time alone with our children from now on.”

Product details

Shipped within 24hrs.
FREE UK Delivery on all orders

• Full delivery details

• » View your basket