Hanna Dunker is a complicated detective to say the least. Mo uses lots of foreshadowing and takes a while to reveal details of Hanna's past and why returning to her hometown is so difficult. A dark procedural showing the effects of a mysterious death on the community. ( )

Maybe 2.5. I'm always up for a promising Scandi noir, and if it has a reasonably intelligent female lead and it's not about a serial killer, all the better.

Mo has set up an interesting premise: discontented detective Hanna Duncker escapes from Stockholm to return to the island where she grew up. Trouble is, her self-destructive alcoholic father (now dead) was a famous local case, found guilty of a nasty murder. No one has forgotten, and few (including her hostile brother) understand why she'd want to come back. So Hanna is the target of suspicion, animosity, and curiosity as she is immediately plunged into investigating the death of a teenaged boy - who is the son of her girlhood best friend, from whom she has been more or less estranged for years. This spreads uneasy tendrils into old relationships, old misunderstandings, and old troubles, as well as forcing Hanna to cope with the challenges of forming new friendships and partnerships on and off the job. She's not very good at that. Nor - in spite of what we are told - is she a particularly brilliant cop. Her detecting is pretty prosaic, insights are few. And - yeah, I know, it's Scandinavian - she BROODS. She's depressive, self-absorbed, and hard for her colleagues to connect to - and, unfortunately, for readers too. So the pacing is sluggish, repetitive, and everything takes too long. At least three characters repeatedly find that they "don't have the energy" to talk to a spouse, answer the phone, go to dinner. The grieving mother of the victim weeps and climbs into bed and pulls the covers over her head. For pages. Over and over. And this debut novelist does not seem to have learned about eliminating stuff that neither moves the story nor evinces character: Hanna walks through the door, puts down her keys (with a sidetrip into how her mother didn't like anyone to put keys on a table), goes through the living room into the kitchen, opens the cupboard, takes down the instant coffee, puts the kettle on the stove... Okaaaay, enough already!

The chapters head-hop: Hanna, her colleague Erik, grieving mom Rebecka, Rebecka's son Joel... and then a kind of clumsy twist of an ending. And all the while, Hanna's dad's murder conviction is lurking in the shadows, because, well, maybe that wasn't quite what it seemed as well. Stay tuned for #2. I'm in no hurry, though.

I will give Mo credit for getting her birds right. Yes, nightingales will sing at night. Yes, there is a bird called a black-winged stilt (we have black-NECKED stilts in is US; same family), and yes, it would be an uncommon bird worth chasing for a Swedish birdwatcher. And she gets the lapwing right too. So, chops for ornithological details. Some of us care about these things... ( )

This is Johanna Mo's English language debut introducing us to a flawed detective, Hanna Duncker. A new entry into the Swedish Noir that more than holds it own! ( )