Echoes from the Dead

Notes

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin is the first of the Öland quartet and won best first novel awards in both the UK and Sweden. The mother of a missing child receives his sandal through the post, but not until twenty years after he had disappeared into the fog.

Theorin intertwines two stories, the investigation into a child’s disappearance and the history of a badly damaged man. The landscape is memorably bleak and gloomy, and whilst the pace is slow, it is riveting. 

A thoughtful thriller, not a slasher.

Publisher’s Synopsis

‘An impressive debut novel’ The Times

‘Fantastic’ Guardian

Can you ever come to terms with a missing child? Julia Davidsson has not. Her five-year-old son disappeared twenty years previously on the Swedish island of Öland. No trace of him has ever been found.

Until his shoe arrives in the post. It has been sent to Julia’s father, a retired sea captain still living on the island. Soon he and Julia are piecing together fragments of the past: fragments that point inexorably to a local man called Nils Kant, known to delight in the pain of others. But Nils Kant died during the 1960s. So who is the stranger seen wandering across the fields as darkness falls?

It soon becomes clear that someone wants to stop Julia’s search for the truth. And that he’s much, much closer than she thinks . . .

Read a full review of Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin at She Reads Novels.