The summer of Kim Novak

At the start of this moving elegy for lost innocence from Nesser (the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries), 49-year-old Erik, the book's narrator, promises to tell the reader about "a terrible and tragic event" that occurred the summer he was 14. In 1962, as Erik's mother is dying of cancer, his grieving father sends the boy to the family's ramshackle lake cabin with 14-year-old Edmund, a fellow student Erik hardly knows, and Erik's older brother, a reporter who intends to write the Great Swedish Novel that summer. After a lazy month of swimming and fantasizing, handball champion Berra Albertsson is found dead in a gravel parking spot near where the boys are staying, his skull caved in, and his fiancée, Ewa Kaludis, the boys' substitute teacher and the object of their dreams, is a suspect. Erik and Edmund embark on a protracted murder investigation that leads them into the mysteries of sex. Nesser sensitively probes the agonies and ecstasies of adolescence, making this an exquisite example of Nordic noir's ability to reveal the darkest emotional depths beneath a cloudless summer sky. Agent: Elisabet Brannstrom, Bonnier Rights. (June)

Nesser's novel follows its young narrator through a series of traumatic events over the course of one summer. When a book begins with the line "I'm going to tell you about a tragic and terrible event that marked my life," it sets up some high expectations. Nesser balances a good sense of place with a feeling of impending doom, turning nostalgia on its head. Teenage narrator Erik, his friend Edmund, and Erik's 22-year-old brother, Henry--who's working on an "unexpected and eerie" novel--spend their summer near an idyllic lake in rural Sweden. The year is 1962, and Erik and Henry's mother is slowly dying of cancer back in their hometown. Before their departure, in the waning days of the school year, they encountered new substitute teacher Ewa, who looks like the actress Kim Novak and is engaged to Berra, a prominent athlete with a violent streak. Not long after the boys arrive for their summer vacation by the lake, they discover that Henry and Ewa are having an affair. Erik's warning of terrible things to come and the presence in the narrative of numerous Agatha Christie novels all act as blatant foreshadowing. When Berra turns up dead, that event dramatically shifts the mood of the book. There are a few idioms which, in Vogel's translation, feel decidedly American in this very Swedish novel, including the phrase "It is what it is," which Erik ponders. As Nesser burrows further into this fictional world, though, as when Erik declares himself part of a clique known as "the anti-soccer crowd," the novel's idiosyncrasies become more charming. While its pacing is uneven, Nesser's novel gains in power as it raises difficult questions about memory and morality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.