We Know You Remember/When the World Fell Silent

 We Know You Remember by Tove Alsterdal

Eira Sjodin, a detective in a small Swedish town, is called in when Olaf Hagstrom finds his father, Sven, murdered in his bathtub. Olaf left town years ago after confessing and serving a prison sentence for the rape and murder of 16 year old Lina Stavred, whose body was never found. He was 14 at the time and is back 23 years later only because he was driving by and wanted a look at the house he'd grown up in. Given the situation, it's easy to assume Olaf committed the murder and Sjodin arrests him on the spot.

As the investigation goes forward, the circumstances surrounding the  earlier crime come into question and Eeira begins to suspect Olaf had been wrongly imprisoned. Long hidden truths come to light involving Sven's neighbours, Eeira's brother's involvement in the dead girl's life comes into question, and the discovery of two additional bodies complicates the case further.

The pace is slow in places but it was interesting enough to make up for that. What annoyed me no end was that fact that there was no end. Olaf is released, but then another wrong person is arrested on murder charges, protecting a real killer, and just when I thought things would turn around, it ended. I don't know if the person arrested will go to prison for a crime he didn't commit, or what will happen to the guilty party. There is a second book about the same detective, but information gleaned from the admittedly undependable internet says it's about another case entirely.

A good story, but without a sequel, it leaves you hanging.

When the World Fell Silent by Donna Jones Alward

A novel set in Nova Scotia at the time of the Halifax explosion in 1917.  A nurse's boyfriend ships out, she learns she's pregnant, and though she writes to him several times, he ignores her letters. A munitions ship in the harbour burns and explodes, taking some of her family members and leaving her to look after her neice and the boarding house her sister ran. Another story line has a young widow and her baby on the dock at the time of the explosion, after which she wakes up in the hospital to find her child was not brought in and is missing. Her family's home having been destroyed, she's released from the hospital with no place to go and a desperate need to find her baby. 

The bones of the story are good, but are filled out with too much repetitive internal dialogue about feelings. More interaction between characters, more "show, don't tell", would have kept it from getting bogged down. The book couldn't decide what tone to settle on - the sombre one of life in the disaster's aftermath or the sweet, homespun one created by repeated use of words like cozy, cuddled, snug, snuggled, etc. 

I didn't enjoy this one.