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

Extract from The Savage Altar by Asa Larsson

And evening came and morning came, the first day

When Viktor Strandgård dies it is not, in fact, for the first time. He lies on his back in the church called The Source of All Our Strength and looks up through the enormous windows in its roof. It’s as if there is nothing between him and the dark winter sky up above.

You can’t get any closer than this, he thinks. When you come to the church on the mountain at the end of the world, the sky will be so close that you can reach out and touch it.

The Aurora Borealis twists and turns like a dragon in the night sky. Stars and planets are compelled to give way to her, this great miracle of shimmering light, as she makes her unhurried way across the vault of heaven.

Viktor Strandgård follows her progress with his eyes.

I wonder if she sings? he thinks. Like a lonely whale beneath the
sea?

And as if his thoughts have touched her, she stops for a second. Breaks her endless journey. Contemplates Viktor Strandgård with her cold winter eyes. Because he is as beautiful as an icon lying there, to tell the truth, with the dark blood like a halo round his long, fair, St. Lucia hair. He can’t feel his legs anymore. He is getting drowsy. There is no pain.

Curiously enough it is his previous death he is thinking of as he lies there looking into the eye of the dragon. That time in the late winter when he came cycling down the long bank toward the crossroads at Adolf Hedinsvägen and Hjalmar Lundbohmsvägen. Happy
and redeemed, his guitar on his back. He remembers how the wheels of his bicycle skidded helplessly on the ice as he tried desperately to brake. How he saw the woman in the red Fiat Uno coming from the right. How they stared at each other, the realization in the other’s eyes; now it’s happening, the icy slide toward death.

With that picture in his mind’s eye Viktor Strandgård dies for the second time in his life. Footsteps approach, but he doesn’t hear them. His eyes do not have to see the gleam of the knife once again. His body lies like an empty shell on the floor of the church; it is stabbed over and over again. And the dragon resumes her journey across the
heavens, unmoved.

Monday, February 17

“Am I disturbing you?” It was Maria Taube. She pushed the door open with her hip, balancing a mug of coffee in each hand. Rebecka’s copy was jammed under her right arm.
Both women were newly qualified lawyers with special responsibility for tax laws, working for Meijer & Ditzinger. The office was at the very top of a beautiful turn-of-the-century building on Birger Jarlsgatan. Semi-antique Persian carpets ran the length of the corridors, and here and there stood imposing sofas and armchairs in attractively worn leather. Everything exuded an air of experience, influence, money and competence. It was an office that filled clients with an appropriate mixture of security and reverence.

“By the time you die you must be so tired you hope there won’t be any sort of afterlife,” said Maria, and put a mug of coffee on Rebecka’s desk. “But of course that won’t apply to you, Maggie Thatcher. What time did you get here this morning? Or haven’t you
been home at all?”

They’d both worked in the office on Sunday evening. Maria had gone home first.

“I’ve only just got here,” lied Rebecka, and took her copy out of Maria’s hand.
Maria sank down into the armchair provided for visitors, kicked off her ridiculously expensive leather shoes and drew her legs up under her body.

“Terrible weather,” she said.

Rebecka looked out the window with surprise. Icy rain was hammering against the glass. She hadn’t noticed earlier. She couldn’t remember if it had been raining when she came into work. In fact, she couldn’t actually remember whether she’d walked or taken the Underground. She gazed in a trance at the rain pouring down the glass as it beat an icy tattoo.

Winter in Stockholm, she thought. It’s hardly surprising that you shut down your brain when you’re outside. It’s different up at home, the blue shining midwinter twilight, the snow crunching under your feet. Or the early spring, when you’ve skied along the river from Grandmother’s house in Kurravaara to the cabin in Jiekajärvi, and you sit down and rest on the first patch of clear ground where the snow has melted under a pine tree. The tree bark glows like red copper in the sun. The snow sighs with exhaustion, collapsing in the warmth. Coffee, an orange, sandwiches in your rucksack.

The sound of Maria’s voice drew her back. Her thoughts scrabbled and tried to escape, but she pulled herself together and met her colleague’s raised eyebrows.

“Hello! I asked if you were going to listen to the news.”

“Yes, of course.”

Rebecka leaned back in her chair and stretched out her arm to the radio on the windowsill.

Lord, she’s thin, thought Maria, looking at her colleague’s ribcage as it protruded from under her jacket. You could play a tune on those ribs.

Rebecka turned the radio up and both women sat with their coffee cups cradled between their hands, heads bowed as if in prayer.

It’s six o’clock and here are the morning headlines. A well-known religious leader around the age of thirty was found murdered early this morning in the church of The Source of All Our Strength in Kiruna. The police in Kiruna are not prepared to make a statement about the murder at this stage, but during the morning they have revealed that no one has been detained so far, and the murder weapon has not yet been found

Rebecka swung her chair round so quickly that she banged her hand on the window sill. She turned the radio off with a crash and at the same time managed to spill coffee on her knee.

“Viktor,” she exclaimed. “It has to be him.”

Maria looked at her with surprise.

“Viktor Strandgård? The Paradise Boy? Did you know him?”

Rebecka avoided Maria’s gaze. Ended up staring at the coffee stain on her skirt, her expression closed and blank. Thin lips, pressed together.

“Of course I knew of him. But I haven’t been home to Kiruna for years. I don’t know anybody up there anymore.”

Maria got up from the armchair, went over to Rebecka and pried the coffee cup from her colleague’s stiff hands.

“If you say you didn’t know him, that’s fine by me, but you’re going to faint in about thirty seconds. You’re as white as a sheet. Bend over and put your head between your knees.”

Like a child Rebecka did as she was told. Maria went to the bathroom and fetched paper towels to try to save Rebecka’s suit from the coffee stain. When she came back Rebecka was leaning back in her chair.

“Are you okay?” asked Maria.

“Yes,” answered Rebecka absently, and looked on helplessly as Maria started to dab at her skirt with a damp towel. “I did know him,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t exactly need a lie detector,” said Maria without looking up. “Are you upset?”

“Upset? I don’t know. Frightened, maybe.”

Maria stopped her frantic dabbing.

“Frightened of what?”

“I don’t know. That somebody will—”

The telephone burst in with its shrill signal before Rebecka could finish. She jumped and stared at it, but didn’t pick it up. After the third ring Maria answered. She put her hand over the receiver so that the person on the other end couldn’t hear her, and whispered:

“It’s for you and it must be from Kiruna, because there’s a Moomin troll on the other end.”

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.”