Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman

"Shh!" said Mia. She was listening intently. Then Annie could hear a sharp, regular sound and a thumping. It was coming closer, and she realized someone was moving along the path farther up and coming toward them. She put her arm around Mia and almost pushed her down behind the tree trunk. The girl landed on the map, which rustled. Then Annie heard the noise again and realized the sharp sound was someone breathing. Panting. But she couldn't make out whether it was an animal or a human being. She held Mia pressed to the ground, but the tree trunk wasn't high enough to conceal Annie, too.

He never even saw her. He was lumbering up the slope, looking straight ahead, his mouth open, his sharp breathing coming in small labored gasps. He was very dark, with long, dead-straight hair he had tucked behind his ears. His eyes were narrow and black and he was carrying something in his arms. She had no time to identify it, seeing only that it hindered him as he hurried on. Then he was gone.

-Blackwater

It is this chance sighting in the forest, in the dead of night, that Annie Raft thinks back to at the beginning of the novel Blackwater. She's convinced she's just seen the same mysterious figure some 18 years later, this person whom she saw only a short while before stumbling upon a gruesome double murder scene. Clearly the two events must be related - right?

One quickly discovers that Kerstin Ekman is interested in probing the mistakes people make and misconceptions they have, and how they can have profound effects. Ekman has a talent for creating complex, flawed characters that don't fit into neat boxes; she is also an able wordsmith (evident even in translation from the original Swedish). Despite these assests, Blackwater is still a rather unsatisfying read.

I've learned that one of the easiest ways a work of art (be it novel, film, etc.) can disappoint you is to unhappily defy your expectations. If you go in expecting a funny book and find things to be quite grim instead, for example. Perhaps it's a wonderfully written serious book, but if you started in expecting to laugh, it may be hard to fully appreciate it.

I expected Blackwater to be a mystery. I suppose it is, in a way (and I've tagged it as such), but it became evident to me that Ekman was far more interested in exploring the ramifications of that double murder on a few of the local residents than actually following the investigation of the crime (really, that only dominates the story in about the last 50 pages or so, and the resolution is fairly anticlimactic). Not a bad idea at all, but not what I'd hoped to read. The rest of the book deals with life on a Swedish commune (not necessarily my cup of tea, as it turns out), the sexual initiation of a teenage boy living with an older woman (Ekman gets almost romance-novel smutty here, and elsewhere, actually), and the dissolution of a doctor's marriage (actually the easiest part to relate to). The novel's protagonist, Annie, is, frankly, rather strange, and I can't say I ever really understood her. It's an interesting choice that puts things a bit off-kilter, but I can't say it actually made the story more enjoyable.

So not much more to say about that one. I've begun Dead Until Dark, the first Sookie Stackhouse novel (on which the show True Blood is based, not that I've seen it yet). I'm hoping it's a good one, since reading two fairly mediocre books in a row is a pretty bad run, to me.