Thirty-four year-old psychologist Siri Bergman spends her days treating patients in her Stockholm practice, focusing her expertise on the troubles of others. At night she resides in a secluded seaside cottage where she struggles to accept the loss of her husband in a diving accident a year prior. Siri copes with her emotions by leaving every light in her small cottage lit, smothering her fear of the dark with copious amounts of cheap wine. She has managed to keep her roiling emotions at bay, but when the feeling of being watched in her home begins to prickle like a cold breeze on the back of her neck Siri finds that an unforeseen enemy may just succeed in tipping the scales and pouring the tumult from her past into the carefully maintained world of her professional life. When a body is found in the water near her cottage Siri understands the true gravity of the danger she’s in. Her enemy is close by, watching her, and the objective is another murder: hers.
- from my review
A few weeks ago the lovely Diane from a spot of whimsy wrote about Neil Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read in a guest post here at Literary Inklings. If you missed it, take a look to get a better idea of what All Hallow’s Read is all about. In the spirit of the celebration I thought it would be fun to, as Neil suggests, give someone a scary book this year – and who better for that someone to be than one of you wonderful folks who kindly take the time to stop by this little corner of the internet?
The book is Some Kind of Peace by Swedish sisters Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff. This was one of the scariest book I read this year; not scary in the outlandish sense, but that quiet, purposeful sort of psychological scary that gets under your skin and never lets you know what turn it will take next. It’s a very intellectual sort of scary (if I can say that without sounding like a snob). And it was one of my favorite books of the year (in my review I said that the authors combined “keen psychological observation, vivid imagery, and a strongly unpredictable storyline to create a novel that is simultaneously a taught thriller and an explorative character study.”). Here’s a tiny little preview–
A few more details on the book: while it was first published in 2009 under its original title, Någon sorts frid, this English edition was published this year, July 10th, by the wonderful Free Press, which is a division of Simon & Schuster. Free Press kindly supplied both my review copy and this additional copy for one of you. It’s a hardcover final copy, and it’s the first in Grebe and Träff’s Siri Bergman series; the second, More Bitter Than Death, will be published in America by Free Press (and elsewhere by Simon & Schuster) in July 2013. If you happen to be able to read Swedish, I believe there are already three books in the series published in their original language. For the rest of us, no spoilers!
Win Some Kind of Peace by Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff
To enter:
Leave a comment anywhere on the blog, Tweet me, e-mail me, or write on my Facebook wall letting me know you want to be in the running to win the book. (You only have to tell me once and you don’t have to be a subscriber to the blog, though you can do that here (rss) or here (e-mail) and it’s free!)
Be sure to leave your e-mail address so I can contact you if you’ve won!
A winner will be chosen on November 1.
And the giveaway is open internationally.
It doesn’t count for anything in the giveaway, but if you want to tell me about the scariest book you read this year (or ever) I’d love to hear about it in the spirit of All Hallow’s Eve! And if you gave books to people this year which did you give, or would you give, or which have you given in the past? What makes a scary book scary, and why are scary books so fun?
Good luck, and happy All Hallow’s Read!
