Everywhere is good, home is best... In the North? And you didn't fall out of a strawberry?
For the longest night of the year, the children and grandchildren of the retired cantorial couple Hermansson descended on the provincial town of Kymlinge in the depths of Sweden. They are to celebrate with the old men their double birthday, the winter solstice and their soon move to the warmth of the Spanish Riviera. It's a white messenger. But no matter how much the angry foremothers of the clan cook up Alcron-style eaters and the single malt whisky flows, it soon becomes apparent, as at all Scandinavian gatherings of this kind, how much the two of them are at loggerheads. And when that same night, the ill-fated son Robert - a black sheep infamous for his fling on a sleazy reality show - disappears from the house, and the following night his twenty-year-old nephew Henrik, a model boy, is disappeared, it sets the stage for a mourning with a chilling overtone. Where did the two go and is their disappearance related to the call of the wild? Or with the sex call? Is it related at all? This is what a policeman must find out over the next grim months, as he bites into the tangle of mysteries with the vigour of a bulldog from a tough school.
The first case of Commissioner Gunnar Barbarotti from Kymlinge. A slightly burnt-out skeptic and a likable man who reveals who is responsible for the missing, even though the devious characters in this crime drama are literally lying to him on the spot.
Håkan Nesser is the first author ever to win the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' annual award for the best Swedish crime novel three times. He also received this award, for example, for his second part of the series with Inspector Barbarotti, entitled A Completely Different Story.
