Saturday, June 19, 2010

Blackwater, by Kerstin Ekman

A couple of years ago we canceled our subscription to the Washington Post.  Just didn't enjoy that paper any longer.  They'd removed the stand-alone business section and merged it with another, their comics  pages was increasingly lame, and we no longer enjoyed their local or national coverage.  Being a local blogger we knew how to find the local coverage we wanted online, so with some left of airline miles we switched to the Wall Street Journal for six months for free.

Really enjoyed the WSJ and we've kept it as our daily paper for a few years now.  I mention this because it was in the WSJ that I first heard about Kerstin Ekman's book Blackwater.  Just a one sentence suggestion for beach reading, noting that it was about a grisly murder in a Swedish forest.  That sounded interesting so it's been on my list for a number of months.

Paperback Swap came through recently with the book and it took me about a week to finish.  While not at all what I expected, it was still a worthwhile read.  It is partly about a murder, that does kind of center the story.  But I found it more about loneliness, isolation, I don't know.  Maybe I was just in the right place, frame of mind for this story, but I found it very enjoyable.  Moody and dark, a slow but ultimately satisfying read.

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