Blackwater

by Kerstin Ekman

Book Overview

On Midsummer's Eve, 1974, Annie Raft arrives with her daughter Mia in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a nearby commune. On her journey through the deep forest, she sumbles upon the site of a grisly double murder--a crime that will remain unsolved for nearly twenty years, until the day Annie sees her grown daughter in the arms of one man she glimpsed in the forest that eerie midsummer night.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312152477
• ISBN13: 9780312152475
• Release Date: December 1996
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Dark read for a dark and stormy night.

I have read and re-read this book about 5 times. Everytime I have re-read it, I find the characters more entangled and complex. It's a dark mystery, full of northern atmosphere, pine forests, cold water and cold weather. Once you start reading, its hard to put down until the last word.

An astonishing and terrifying thriller

This is a must-read.Blackwater is a beautifully plotted thriller. It does what all good thrillers should do: it uses the mystery of a brutal crime to explore deeper, darker mysteries. I came to the book having read Ekman's The Forest of Hours, a novel which shares with Blackwater an obsession with time, memory and survival. Above all, Kerstin Ekman evokes the forces of nature with exquisite detail and passion. She is a writer of stature. We need more of her novels in English.

Deep and rich characterizations and landscapes

I was really enthralled by this book. The rich development of characters plus the beautiful description of the scandinavian landscape. It does require your full attention.The smells, the sights, and the sounds were very vivid and I know I will undoubtedly reread it at some future time. I rather compare it slightly with Smilla's Sense of Snow which had the same sense of ethereal mystery. I do believe, however that the feeling that one has for the cold and unforgiving climate is a factor in the fascination of these two novels.

Deeply sensual and dramatically moving murder mystery.

During a holiday in 1994 visiting Oslo and Bergen I was given a gift of "Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow" (F. David Translation). I finished it on my flight back to San Francisco and felt the utter void experienced after reading a book that one feels shall not have any peer. Fortunately, I was wrong. It took only two years to find "Blackwater" and Kerstin Ekman. Blackwater is a novel of vast human perception blending fatalistic destiny and paganism along with basic Sherlock Holmes sleuthing all set against a sometimes desolate, but beautiful and lonely landscape that conceals a constant undercurrent of emotional arousal. An aura of mystery and suspense surrounds each and every highly descriptive locale within the novel from the initial murder site in the woods to a secret mountain hideaway along the Norwegian border to an apartment in Stockholm and many others along the way. This has to be one of the finest novels that I have ever read regardless of genre.