‘There’s something about death that gets under your skin and destroys you from the inside. Nobody warns you about it before you go. Nobody explains what happens to you once you’ve seen death first hand, when you’ve stared it in the face. The way it kind of gets its claws into you. Becomes part of you.

I love reading Scandinavian Mysteries. The Silver Road attracted me on NetGalley by it’s beautiful cover and intriguing  description. I am glad I’ve read this as it was so good.

Reading this book was like drinking, pure, cold water.

This is the story of Lelle and Meja. Lelle is a middle aged teacher, whose daughter have gone missing three years ago from a bus stop, in broad daylight. Everyone tells him off, the police, his now ex-wife. But he doesn’t give up searching for his lost daughter, Lina.

what remained with him was the loneliness, the fact that there was such loneliness everywhere. It corroded the region at the edges, spreading like a sickness among those who remained when all the others had moved away. And now he was one of them. One of the lonely people.

Meja and her mother Silje has a dysfunctional relationship, and they’re in a constant struggle to survive. From an early age Meja accepted her mother as a burden and a liability.

 They had argued and cried and sat in long periods of silence as the forest thickened outside the window and the distance between stations became longer and longer.
Silje had sworn that this would be the last time they moved .

They move in with a  man called Torbjorn- his house is extremely isolated- and very near where Lelle lives.

Torbjörn was a real man, according to Silje. A man who knew how to survive in extreme conditions and who could look after them.

For Meja, who always moved from city to city in South Sweden, North of Sweden is strange and foreign. The daylight doesn’t end, she cannot sleep, in the edge of the forest everything is so foreign and while she tries to fit in and understand this new environment, in parallel  Lelle doesn’t give up his desperate search for Lina..

The story switched between their viewpoints, and I really enjoyed this story although I did see the end and the villain coming.

I don’t know if it was because I read this in the dead hours of the night, but I felt myself sitting next to Lelle in his car, desperately driving on Silver Road, I could even see the front lights hitting the tarmac!

A bravo to the translator is essential, Susan Beard has done an amazing job. Writing is so flawless, I haven’t even realised this was a translation until I checked! The sad, elegant writing was there from start to finish.

Highly recommended for lovers of Scandi Crime.