There’s a particular kind of man who still has a shelf of Henning Mankell paperbacks with cracked spines and a faint smell of a 2009 holiday on them. I am that man. So when a Swedish crime novel starts getting described as the genre’s big win of the year, my ears go up like a spaniel hearing a crisp packet.
The book is Sot. The Swedish word means soot, which tells you roughly how cheerful it is. It opens with a dead fashion designer at a mountain resort and then a social worker blown up in his own rowing boat. Here’s what it is, why it’s worth knowing about, and what to read while you wait for it to reach these shores.
What is Sot about?
The setup is classic Nordic noir with the dials turned up. Ewa Åkerman, a fashion designer, dies at a smart lodge in the Swedish mountains. Not long afterwards a social worker is killed when the small wooden boat he’s in explodes. On paper the two victims have nothing in common. A glamorous designer and a council-type caseworker don’t usually move in the same circles, and working out how they’re connected is the engine of the book.
Two investigators pull at different ends of the same rope. Vera Bergström is the one chasing the link between the deaths. Meanwhile Mikael Nyman, a psychologist, finds a badly injured woman out in the remote northern wilderness, which is about as far from help as you can get in Europe without a passport stamp for the Arctic. You can see the strands heading towards each other. The fun is in how long the author makes you wait.
The Swedish reviews keep coming back to the idea of a core of hatred running through it. This isn’t a cosy whodunnit with a vicar and a poisoned scone. It’s about how resentment builds up over years until it finally goes off, sometimes literally.
Is Sot available in English?
This is the bit that matters to most of us, because my Swedish runs to ordering meatballs and apologising. Sot is a Swedish-language novel, and no English edition has been announced. That’s normal. Even the big Scandinavian crime hits usually take a year or more to be translated, and plenty never cross the North Sea at all.
If you want to keep an eye on it, the usual routes work. Translated crime tends to come out through the specialist imprints of the big British publishers, and once a deal is signed it’ll show up in the trade press and in bookshop pre-order listings under its English title, which may well not be Soot. Publishers love to rename these things. Your local library is also worth a word: UK public libraries take reader requests, and plenty stock Nordic crime both in print and through their e-book and audiobook apps.
There’s no screen adaptation in the works that has been announced either. Given how quickly Scandinavian crime gets snapped up by streamers, I wouldn’t bet my TV licence against one turning up eventually.
The best Nordic noir was never really about the murders. It’s about the slow build-up of hatred in places too quiet for anyone to notice.
Why Swedish crime still gets under the skin
It’s fair to ask whether we need more of this. We’ve had the Wallander novels, the Millennium trilogy, The Bridge, and enough moody detectives staring at grey water to fill a Volvo dealership. Nordic noir peaked around the time the rest of us discovered the knitted jumper, and plenty of what followed was just the same formula with fresh snow on it.
What keeps the good ones going is the setting doing real work. Sot is set in Jämtland, a huge, thinly populated region of mountains, lakes and forest where the nearest neighbour might be a reindeer. That isolation isn’t wallpaper. When someone’s in trouble out there, nobody’s coming quickly, and when a community is that small, grudges don’t fade. They get handed down.
Then there’s the social conscience, which has always been the genre’s secret ingredient. Making one of the victims a social worker is a deliberate choice. Swedish crime writers have spent decades using murder plots to poke at the cracks in their welfare state, and a social worker is someone who sees the worst of a place and gets blamed for it. If you’ve ever read a serious case review in a British newspaper and thought somebody should write a novel about this, you’ll know the feeling.
What to read and watch while you wait
If Sot has given you an itch, the same corner of Sweden has already given us something to scratch it with. The Åre Murders on Netflix is based on Viveca Sten’s novels and set around the same ski resort area where Sot begins. It’s a decent five-episode watch for a wet weekend, with a detective who’s escaped Stockholm only to find murder has followed her up the mountain. Sten’s books are also available in English if you’d rather read.
For something further north and wilder, Åsa Larsson’s Rebecka Martinsson novels, set around Kiruna in Swedish Lapland, are among the best Scandinavian crime fiction in English translation. Start with Sun Storm. They have the same mix of brutal landscape, buried family history and small-town poison that Sot is being praised for.
And if you’ve never actually read Mankell, as opposed to watching Kenneth Branagh look sad in a field, go back to Faceless Killers. It’s from 1991 and holds up better than most of us from that year. Kurt Wallander is the reason this whole genre exists in British bookshops, and it’s worth seeing where it all started.
My verdict on the hype
I’ll be honest about the limits here: I’m judging a book I can’t yet read in full in my own language, so treat this as a tip-off rather than a review. But the ingredients are good ones. Two victims who shouldn’t connect, two investigators coming at it from opposite directions, a setting that’s beautiful and properly dangerous, and a theme with some weight to it rather than a serial killer with a gimmick.
Swedish readers have been burnt by plenty of identikit snow-and-sorrow thrillers, so when they get excited, it usually means something. Put it on your list, keep half an eye on the bookshop new releases, and in the meantime there’s a stack of Jämtland and Lapland crime in English to get you in the mood. Bring a jumper.
In short
Sot, meaning soot, is a Swedish crime novel in which investigator Vera Bergström hunts the link between a fashion designer’s death at a mountain resort and a social worker killed in an exploding boat, while psychologist Mikael Nyman finds a badly injured woman in the wilderness. It’s only available in Swedish for now, with no English translation or screen adaptation announced. Until it arrives, Viveca Sten’s The Åre Murders on Netflix and Åsa Larsson’s Rebecka Martinsson novels give you the same chilly northern Swedish setting in English.
Sources
Midcent Entertainment
Ashley Isaacs picks what's worth your evening – film, TV, streaming, music and books for men 45 and over with limited evenings and too many subscriptions. Reviews of what's new on Netflix, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer and the rest, crime dramas worth a weekend, and classics worth a second look. What's worth watching, what isn't, and where to find it in the UK.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to ashley@midcent.uk.
