French author Gustawsson is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She elegantly lures readers in with flowing prose peppered with humour, so you don’t fully comprehend until later the terribly dark places in which she leads you. Real-life horrors, old and new, inspire her award-winning crime tales.
Canadian profiler Emily Roy and French writer Alexis Castells return in this sequel to the excellent Block 46, faced with another disturbing case spanning borders and decades. In London, a famous actress is abducted, an eerie echo of the Tower Hamlet murders of a decade before. A mutilated body is found in a Swedish forest, wounds identical to the Tower Hamlet victims.
While Roy and Castells get tangled in the modern investigation, which tears open wounds on a case the British cops thought they’d solved, Gustawsson also takes readers back to a time when Jack the Ripper terrified the London streets.
Keeper unfurls effortlessly through these leaps about in time, place, and point of view, ratcheting up the tension. Gustawsson does a great job bringing historic London to life; it’s not the genteel nostalgia of Downton Abbey, but a Dickensian world of sordid, grimy horrors and a hardscrabble, cut-throat fight to survive on fluid-stained streets.
A very good read from a talented crime writer.
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
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