Five fall out in the forest

The Republic of Trees by Sam Taylor

Faber & Faber 2006, 240 pages

At the start of the summer holidays, four teenagers run away to a forest in the French countryside. There they indulge in their favourite pastimes: Alex goes hunting, Isobel sunbathes, Michael climbs trees and falls in love with Isobel, Louis plans a revolution. With Louis as director, the children act out scenes from defining moments in French history; they build their own guillotine and declare themselves a republic but when Joy arrives to complete their number events take a sinister turn.

When I plucked this one from the trolley and turned it over in my hand, my eyes caught the words “nightmarish and unforgettable climax” so of course, I had to take it out. Whilst the innocence of the characters, the sweltering summer and sexual tension are perfectly evoked, the story throws up questions for which there don’t appear to be any answers. As far removed from Harry Potter as you could possibly get, perversely when I turned the final page I had a Ron Weasley moment and two words popped into my head – bloody hell!

Blog Editor’s note: offmytrolley has never read the Harry Potter books, she just watches the films when they are on the TV and has been known to dress up as a house elf occasionally.

Scandinavian suspense

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin

Translated by Marlaine Delargy

Doubleday 2008, 400 pages

One foggy day in September on the Swedish island of Öland, a child escapes the confines of his grandparents’ garden and is never seen again. Twenty years on, his mother Julia Davidsson is still refusing to accept that her son Jens is dead, getting through her days and nights with the help of red wine and pills. When she receives a telephone call from her elderly father Gerlof, telling her that he has been sent one of her sons shoes in the post, Julia decides to return to the island to help in the search for the truth.

There hasn’t been much crime on here up until now, me having been brought up to be a law-abiding citizen, but everyone has lapses now and again and this book was just too tempting. (That doesn’t mean that I nicked it from Waterstones!) If you are looking for a stonking good read with an excellent plot, oodles of atmosphere and characters that you can really take to your heart, then look no further. But be warned, when I got to the end and all the loose threads had been neatly tied up I somehow felt cast adrift, not because I didn’t know what had happened, but because I knew what had.

Echoes from the Dead is Johan Theorin’s first novel, it has already won him a crime fiction prize in his native Sweden and I’m willing to bet that there will be more to follow, if not I’ll eat my library ticket!