Echoes From the Dead- Winner of the CWA John Creasey/New Blood Dagger on October 21st 2009!
He'd just go a little bit further over the soft ground. He knew where he was, after all; the cottage where his grandmother lay sleeping was behind him, even if he couldn't see it any more. He carried on over the flat ground, walking towards the hazy wall of fog which could be seen but not touched, and which kept moving just a little bit further away from him all the time, in a magical way, as if it were playing with him.
The boy stopped. He was holding his breath.
Everything was silent and nothing was moving, but suddenly the boy had the feeling that he wasn't alone.
Had he heard a noise in the fog?
On a foggy summer's day in the early 1970's, a little boy disappears from the island of Öland, leaving not a single trace. For days his family, the police and volunteers search for him with no results.
Twenty years later the boy's mother, Julia, receives an unexpected telephone call from her father, a retired sea-captain, still living on Öland. That morning the postman brought him a package containing the worn and mended shoe of a child. He now asks her to come there to help him with his investigations into the disappearance of his grandson.
Although reluctant at first, she returns to the island where she grew up, and soon they are both involved in the piecing together of a puzzle of the past. It is only now that Julia hears the tales of a mythical man from Öland, Nils Kant, once the fear of the whole countryside. But he is long since dead and buried, long before Julia's son disappeared. Still people say that he sometimes can be seen, wandering across the fields as darkness falls. In the shady twilight hour.
Echoes From the Dead is a crime novel out of the ordinary, a tale of sorrow and deep loss with shadows from the past hovering over the present. The reader is swept along, from the barren nature of Öland back to the Second World War, away to distant ports of the Caribbean and back again.