ÅSA LARSSON and translator Frank Perry chat to Paul Burke about THE SINS OF OUR FATHERS, translation, moving a whole town - Kiruna, good soil for a writer to dig in
THE SINS OF OUR FATHERS forensic pathologist Lars Pohjanen has only a few weeks to live when he asks Rebecka Martinsson to investigate a murder that has long since passed the statute of limitations. A body found in a freezer at the home of the deceased alcoholic, Henry Pekkari, has been identified as a man who disappeared without a trace in 1962: the father of Swedish Olympic boxing champion Börje Ström. Rebecka wants nothing to do with a fifty-year-old case - she has enough to worry about. But how can she ignore a dying man's wish?
When the post-mortem confirms that Pekkari, too, was murdered, Rebecka has a red-hot investigation on her hands. But what does it have to do with the body kept in his freezer for decades?
Meanwhile, the city of Kiruna is being torn down and moved a few kilometres east, to make way for the mine that has been devouring the city from below. With the city in flux, the tentacles of organized crime are slowly taking over . . .
Åsa Larsson was born and grew up in Kiruna, Sweden. She is a qualified lawyer and made her debut in 2003 with The Savage Altar, which was awarded the Swedish Crime Writers' Association prize for best debut novel. Its sequel, The Blood Spilt, was chosen as Best Swedish Crime Novel of 2004, as was The Second Deadly Sin in 2011. Her novels were adapted for television and shown on More 4.
The sixth and final book in the Rebecka Martinsson series, The Sins of Our Fathers, was named Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, and is the winner of the Adlibris Suspense Award, the Storytel Award.
FRANK PERRY's translations have won the Swedish Academy Prize for the introduction of Swedish literature abroad and the prize of the Writer's Guild of Sweden for drama translation. His translation of Lina Wolff's Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs was the 2017 winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was awarded the triennial Bernard Shaw Prize for best literary translation from Swedish.
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Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.
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