The Darkest Room

' The dead are our neighbours everywhere on the island, and you have to get used to it .'

It is bitter mid-winter on the Swedish island of Oland, and Katrine and Joakim Westin have moved with their children to the boarded-up manor house at Eel Point.

A skilful mix of ghost story and crime thriller...this book is outstanding. It crosses genres effortlessly and keeps all its balls in the air with consummate skill.

If you like Stieg Larsson, try a much better Swedish writer, Johan Theorin, whose first two books ( Echoes from the Dead and The Darkest Room ) are now available in English. Both self-contained and set on the Baltic island of Oland, both murder mysteries with a sense of the supernatural but explicable all the same

Penetrating, intelligent

Echoes from the Dead was rightly acclaimed in the UK, and this, his second, is even better. A powerful study of grief, loss and vulnerability, with a commendably earth-bound solution

Theorin builds the tension exquisitely

Throughout his life, Johan Theorin has been a regular visitor to the Baltic island of Öland, where his books are set. His mother's family - sailors, fishermen and farmers - have lived there for centuries, nurturing the island's rich legacy of strange tales and folklore. A journalist by profession, Johan lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.