Black River by Will Dean

Black River is Will Dean’s third novel and once again we’re with journalist Tuva Moodyson. She’s off the booze and living down in Malmo having got a big break on a big-city paper.  But when Tammy, her best friend in the back-of-beyond town of Gavrik, goes missing, Tuva quickly returns to help find her. 

At first, the police don’t take Tammy’s disappearance seriously, and it is left to Tuva and her friends to investigate. Tuva is upset by this, suspecting that it is in part at least due to racism, Tammy being of Thai descent. When a second woman, Lisa, also goes missing, and her family and the police swing into action, this is confirmed to Tuva who resents the fact that the disappearance of this white woman is what got the police to act. Tuva is keen to find both women and uses her position as a journalist to push the police and uncover leads.  

Will Dean’s novels have gained a lot of success and no small part of that is down to his quirky characters. The novels are set around the town of Gavrik, situated in the middle of the Swedish wilds, and many of his characters are some of the strangest oddballs to grace fiction. For example, in his brilliant debut, Dark Pines, we were introduced to the wood-carving sisters, two women who carve trolls out of wood and use real human toenails and hair to decorate them.

Dark Pines was an absolutely brilliant debut. Dean’s second novel, Red Snow, was also good, a 5 star read, but despite the fact that I awarded it top billing I felt it was lacking something compared to the original. And that was the characters. Red Snow was a great novel, but there was no one to rival the wood-carving sisters and others that populated the original. 

With Black River, Dean rivals his first novel. We have a snake obsessive who is also weirdly fanatical about genetics and pure bloodlines, known as The Breeder; two cousins (or are they cousins? many people wonder) who sell shipping container conversions for housing. Then there are other characters who appeared in the first two books and who have been fleshed out, such as the creepy Freddy, who works in a shoe shop and is obsessed with feet. Once again in this title, Dean has established himself as the king of quirky and odd characters.

At the end of this novel, it’s revealed that the local paper (for which Tuva worked in the first two titles) is branching out to cover a nearby, even more, isolated town. Tuva is offered a new job, which no doubt she’s bound to accept, and I for one am looking forward to seeing just what oddballs she encounters on her new beat.

5 out of 5 stars