Blackwater

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. Like Gorky Park and Smilla's Sense of Snow, Blackwater is a unique trhiller in which the hearts and minds of the characters are as strikingly compelling as the exotic northern landscape that envelops them.

Kerstin Ekman is the author of seventeen novels that have been published in Scandinavia and Europe. Blackwater--her first novel published in English--received the Swedish Crime Academy's Award for best crime novel, the August Prize, and the Nordic Counci's Literary Prize. She lives in Valsjobyn, a small village in northern Sweden.

"Thrilling...a superbly written and atmospherically engaging crime novel." --Sven Birkerts, The Washington Post Book World

"Wonderful..powerfully enigmatic. . .extremely intelligent. . .Blackwater workds so brilliantly both as a mystery and an evocation of an unfamiliar world." --Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"Sriking ...Graham Greene meets Dean Koontz." --Entertainment Weekly

"Never uninvolving. . .keeps us guessing. . .Ekman tosses out conventional plot mechantics and stuns us with unexpected tragedy and twist after twist." --Peter Handel, San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle

"Mesmerizing. . .like Smilla's Sense of Snow, it is beautifully written, absorbing, and accessible. It makes you hold your breath." --Newsday