Sun Storm
Summary: On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies mutilated and defiled–and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall…
Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the town she’d left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm attorney, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the revivalist church his charisma helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor and a dogged policewoman. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark, wrenching, and impossible to guess….from https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/98137/sun-storm-by-asa-larsson/9780385340786/
Group Review/Comments:
5 thumbs up
5 thumbs down
To be fair, the thumbs down group was pretty strong, but the thumbs up group mostly gave “mild likes.”
Those who liked the novel felt it had potential and gave it leeway for clearly being a “set up” book, leading into a new series. There were complex characters that the author could delve into deeper in subsequent books. In fact, one group member had read the second in series and thought it was very good.
Thumbs up members liked the premise and setting, and the one character that everyone liked the best–Anna Marie–does show up in the next in series.
The ending was liked as was the main character.
The criticisms included the feeling that the characters were stock characters, paper thin–not enough depth. Many of the characters were annoying and the plot “ham-fisted.” The plot was “weird and improbable” and “not nuanced enough for the theme.” There were no redeemable characters and the book was hard to get through. The set up of the theme made it difficult to view the characters without pre-conceived ideas about cults, and the author did not “create the world” of the novel well.
