And of course, I love getting to revisit some of my fave characters book after book (Troll Sisters I am looking at your cameo!).

Tuva Moodyson is a deaf journalist working for the Gavrik Posten. She is reeling from her partner’s shooting and its repercussions: Noora Ali, her beloved, is now in a coma like state with no chances of getting better. Do you need a new book to add to your TBR, one that has not only a chilly atmosphere but also a chilling plot? I’m assuming you’re nodding your head thinking, yes that’s exactly what I’m looking for, because that’s why you’re here, right?! There is nothing better than a reading a book that matches the current season, a beach read in the summer, a horror novel in the fall or a book like Dark Pines in the winter. It had a fantastic combination of a strong and interesting lead character, a creepy setting in the dense forests of Sweden and an strange murder case that left me puzzled. From the blurb one would assume that Dark Pines is a typical Scandinavian thriller - a chilly tale of murder set in a small town, deep in the forests of rural Sweden. Dark Pines" written by Will Dean is the first in the deaf journalist, Tuva Moodyson series set in Sweden and was featured on the Sunday morning tv show 'The Zoe Ball Book Club'. Tuva Moodyson is now on my list of favourite characters- no doubt about that! After leaving London to help her mother, Tuva finds herself working in a small town newspaper office as a reporter. Tuva is deaf – though she can hear with the use of hearing aids. I love how she switches off her hearing aids when she wants to shut out the world. I also loved that she was determined that her hearing impairment doesn’t define her. I suspect there is a lot more for the reader to learn about this character, especially relating to her life in London as we really only scratch the surface – Eeeek! I can’t wait!Another strength of the novel is the intense and almost claustrophobic, picture it paints of the small town of Gavrik - with its hunting season, and close-knit small business community with a web of connections and histories between individuals. Thanh Dao, Dean’s narrator, is a young Vietnamese woman who came to the UK on false promises of a good job, and found herself sold to Lenn. She cannot leave for various reasons: the vastness of the fields that surround her, an injured ankle and the safety of her beloved sister, Kim-Ly, who is also in the UK. Tuva is an outsider to the community. She moved to the community to be closer to her mum who has deteriorating health issues. She walks a narrow line where locals are critical of her for creating bad press for the town. Tuva is ambitious and curious, digging further into the murders, despite hostility from the town and Police, receiving strange gifts and putting herself in danger. THE AUTHOR: Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. He was a bookish, daydreaming kid who found comfort in stories and nature (and he still does). After studying Law at the LSE, and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden. He built a wooden house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it's from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. The scene came to Dean in 2016, one night as he lay awake in bed. “I was in that strange time between wakefulness and sleep, and I saw very flat, featureless fields with a little tumbledown cottage. Then I saw a woman there,” he says. “She looked like she was living a fairly normal life there, but I knew she couldn’t leave. I wanted to understand why, and I wanted to understand her story. That night between midnight and 6am, the whole book came to me.”

This is my first Tuva Moodyson (I hadn't realised it was a series) although I've read Will Dean's excellent work previously. I have to say it's not essential that you read the earlier ones but I always like to start at the beginning. I think in this case it might help. The Tuva Moodyson series remains one of my favourite crime series and one I can’t get enough of. I hope that we will see a lot more of Tuva in future. I just love that Will Dean can write a thriller, a PROPER whodunnit, a pacey & gory mystery...... that folds into its mix: pear flavoured wine gums, bouts of hayfever in MacDonalds, the rigmorale of changing out of layers of clothing & how a Hillux handles. Will Dean puts the REAL in surreal. This is a series that is just a MUST for thriller lovers, character drama lovers, nordic noir lovers and people who just enjoy a strong series that delivers time after time.I enjoyed the setting of small town Sweden and the procession of creepy eccentrics lined up as possible culprits. The atmosphere is dark and unsettling and the tension grows steadily with a good, solid ending. I loved every moment of this one. Every word. It was just blinking brilliant. This is DEFINITELY one to watch in 2018 and has pretty much guaranteed itself a place in my top ten reads for this year – Dark Pines is a novel to watch and Will Dean is an author to watch. I sense great things ahead. I liked this, how could you not like something so atmospheric and that takes you to the wilderness of Sweden forests? Dean is the author of the excellent Tuva Moodyson series, in which young, deaf reporter Tuva digs into various crimes in the wilds of Sweden. Like The Last Thing to Burn, the first book in the series, Dark Pines, came to him as an image – a huge forest, much bigger than the one he lives in.

The reader finds themselves in Sweden facing loss; grief; differences; secrets/lies; discrimination; small-town mentalities; judgement; a search for the truth – all is not what it seems in the isolated Swedish town, that’s for sure!! While this book can definitely be read as a standalone do be aware that it references a lot of content from the previous books, but it doesn’t name any names in terms of who did what. A young woman goes missing within the perimeter of the farm compound. Can Tuva talk her way inside the tight-knit group to find her story?The climax and solution to the murders is a bit of a surprise, but the presentation is clumsy, drawn out, pacing poor. Almost an info-dump. We're constantly being reminded that Tuva is deaf. It seemed to me that maybe the author thought that we'd forget and wanted us to remember because it may or may not play a role later on. Tuva is always fidgeting with the dials on her hearing aids, putting them in, taking them out, covering them so they don't get wet. I get it - she's deaf. I have a great-uncle that uses aids and people are always commenting on how he's constantly messing with the volume, so maybe this is a thing and I'm wrong. The plot and mystery is okay, not fantastic and again nothing compared to the wonderfully creepy eyeless corpses of the first book. The murders happen close to Mossen Village, an out-of-the-way very small community of houses in Utgard forest. Along the way of Tuva's investigation, she meets a plethora of characters from this village, all very bizarre in their own individual way. And this probably gets to my biggest issue with the book – it was a book I did not want to end, but not (as is sometimes the case) because the book was so enjoyable I wanted to carry on reading it, but simply because I knew that the conventions of the genre would take over and that the story would have to be resolved, probably with some form of rather implausible explanation.