Shadows (Skuggans spel)

Lars Rambe

In the idyllic town of Strängnäs the preparations for the upcoming jazz festival are intense. The whole town is cooking. In Mariefred, the pearl of Lake Mälaren, it’s the same thing. The festival will offer great musical events and exciting sessions with musicians of world class. At the local newspaper, Strengnes Dagblad, Fredrik Gransjö and his colleagues are looking forward to a lot of work and much excitement.

 

What they don’t know is that the events will offer a lot more than musical encounters. When the notorious criminal Marcin Szalas makes a spectacular escape from the prison of Mariefred it’s only the first of many violent occurrences this summer.

                       

Sanna Friborg works as a clerk at the bank of Mariefred and she has finally made up her mind. She’s sick of the intolerance and she hates men and their greedy looks. She is leaving to look for the life she always yearned for. Her plan is to finally get away from everyone who let her down and in return, she is prepared to deceive them. The jazz saxophonist Stanislaw Creutz is her ticket, but what she doesn’t know is that the prize will be much higher than she expects.

 

Emma Gibbons has a temporary job at the local paper. With the help of Fredrik Gransjö she starts to see structures in the puzzle of events that take place. She discovers connections that nobody else does and it leads her right to the unexpected solution. A murderer is walking around and when the secrets finally unfolds, who steps out of the shadow?

 

382 pages

 

English reading material available. Translation by Neil Betteridge.

 

Rights sold

Germany: dtv

Italy: Newton Compton

The Netherlands: De Fontein

Sweden: Kalla Kulor Förlag

 

Reviews

"In The Shadows (Il mosaico di ghiaccio) Rambe once again builds a thriller with suspense and intenseness and speed that escalates through the book. This time it’s accompanied by the best musical compositions. The lonely voice that whispers the story increases and becomes a whole chorus of voices. This chorus delivers the unexpected as it turns out that people are not as good nor as peaceloving as the first impression may imply.”

Giornale di Brescia, Italy

 

"The Shadows (Il mosaico di ghiaccio) is more than a conventional thriller. Rambe has the courage to change the pattern of the classic genre and by doing this a freshness appears in the story. He uses the rural environment as a background, mixes it with a touch of irony and avoids the obvious. By doing so he creates an engaging story in a totally new way."

Liberi di Scrivere, Italien

 

"Lars Rambe has done it again. I liked The Clue On The Pier a lot and I liked this book too. Lars Rambe uses a light language that makes the story suspenseful. It’s hard to let go of the book which makes it a page turner. Every chapter ends with a cliff hanger that makes it necessary to just read on. I grade it 5 out of 5."

Boksidan.net

 

"It happened to be so that I have read Lars Kepler’s The Paganini Contract and Shadows parallel. There are several similarities. They are both sequels to debuting crime novelists, they are both teeming with characters, both of them have quite a bit of violence and action, they are both mainly thrillers but with some uncertain details to be solved towards the end.

But Rambe’s small town setting wins against Kepler’s Stockholm."

DAST Magazine

 

Italian trailer