You Will Never Be Found by Tove Alsterdal
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You Will Never Be Found
By Tove Alsterdal
Translated by Alice Menzies
Harper Collins 2023
It takes Tove Alsterdal 200 pages in her 2021 book Slukhål (now out from Harper as You Will Never Be Found in an English-language translation by Alice Menzies) to state outright what every single reader will have found themself thinking. “Almost seven thousand people were reported missing in Sweden every year, half as a result of things like depression or dementia,” they’re told. “Only in rare cases was there any crime involved, and the majority were found within a few days – either that or they came home, or were discovered to have left simply because they felt like it.”
In You Will Never Be Found, people seem to be moving around and going missing at a pace that belies the book’s bucolic setting in the wooded boonies of Sweden’s Arctic Circle.
You Will Never Be Found is Alsterdal’s English-language follow-up to 2021’s We Know You Remember (just as that earlier book’s original title, Rotvälta, would have been more evocatively translated as ominous Rot, so too You Will Never Remember would have been more memorably titled Hole, but the current fad of hyperventilating declaratives apparently can’t be denied). Both books star Swedish police officer Eira Sjödin, who was briefly ensnared in the dark events of the previous book and is now trying to keep her distance from the more high-stakes world of the Violent Crimes Unit and its leader, the charismatic Georg “GG” Georgsson.
“As a responding officer, she was sent out to do whatever was needed, then she changed out of her uniform and went home,” she reflects. “Tomorrow was another day. Her work didn’t take over, and rarely haunted her dreams.”
Eira has other things to prioritize, including moving her mother Kerstin into an assisted care home (“Kerstin was still young when the dementia took hold, just over seventy,” readers are told, bewilderingly. Do people live to 300 in Sweden?). At first, when she does a pro forma investigation of a missing man named Hans Runne, she thinks little of it – he’s a normal guy who seems to be one of those thousands of people who quite sensibly decide to explore non-Arctic Circle options.
But Runne’s people aren’t so complacent. “Normal people don’t just disappear for no reason,” they complain, and soon a starved man is found dead, locked in the basement of an abandoned house deep in the woods. Eira investigates with her hottie partner August Engelhardt (handsome boyish face, gym-toned body, perfectly willing to have a no-strings bedroom romp now and again), and when the case comes to the attention of her old comrades at Violent Crimes, GG wants her back on the case.
That case becomes significantly more complicated when GG himself seems to disappear, leaving a car covered in parking tickets and no clues at all as to the why or the where.
These are ingredients for a slalom-paced police-procedural, but if you’re expecting to get that in these pages, this is clearly your first go-round with the weird sub-genre of Scandi Noir. Like its predecessor (and with far too grim a consistency to make it likely that translator Menzies is responsible), You Will Never Be Found puts out all the ingredients for a feast, works up both the hunger and the interest of its guests, the readers, and then goes for a long, ruminative, and solitary walk.
At least the ingredients are high-quality. There are wonderfully terse place-descriptions, tart observations about the fine social distinctions of modern-day rural Nordic towns, and some genuinely creepy moments. And although Eira’s personal life sludges along at a glacial pace, it covers some interesting territory, including a potentially fascinating development not between Eira and August but between Eira and GG. And although the plot has gentle dogleg turns rather than “twists,” some of the turns are unexpected (there are also dozens of instances of the elliptical oddity of Scandi Noir, non sequitur blurtings like “There are bears around here,” “How do you know?” “I just do”).
Readers already addicted to the half-light and lowering snow of Scandinavian Noir will eagerly consume You Will Never Be Found, the latest from a rising star of the sub-genre. Everybody else might want to think about taking a reading vacation to the French Riviera or sunny Italy.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.