Blackwater (1996)

Annie Raft sleeps beside a shotgun she can load in 22 seconds. And for 18 years — since discovering two bloody corpses in the northern Scandinavian woods, where night comes without darkness — she has slept that way and never forgotten to lock the doors. The publisher calls the European prizewinner Blackwater a thriller, but its stark imagery, stunning introspection, and brooding natural setting place it in some darker, richer category — a sort of Graham Greene meets Dean Koontz, if you will. This is the first of Kerstin Ekman's 17 novels to appear in English, and the translation's monotonous rhythms (which may or may not be the same in the original) manage to flatten even the best passages of the book. But Blackwater is a striking enough tale to survive. A-