FORTY DAYS WITHOUT SHADOW.

FORTY DAYS WITHOUT SHADOW by OLIVER TUC.

SOURCE: Received for review from Kelsey McBride of Book Publicity Services.

PRESS RELEASE BLURB: Winter is savage and cold in Lapland. When a priceless local relic is stolen from Kautokeino, a village in the middle of the isolated snowy tundra, detectives Klemot Nango - a familiar face in the rural community - and Nina Nansen, fresh out of the local police academy, are called to investigate.

There are just a few days until the locals will host a UN conference on indigenous peoples, and Klemet and Nina are under pressure to retrieve the artefact. When a local reindeer herder is found brutally murdered soon afterwards, Klemet and Nina immediately suspect that the two events are linked. But the villagers don't take kindly to having their secret histories stirred up and the duo is forced to cross the icy landscapes alone in search of the answers that will lead them to a killer.

FIRST SENTENCE {Prologue. 1693, Central Lapland}: Aslak stumbled, a sign of exhaustion.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 68}: Aslak is half man, half beast. I saw him one day, on all fours, in among his herd. He's the last one on the vidda to castrate his reindeer with his teeth.

MY THOUGHTS: On the one hand, an engaging read, on the other, one I struggled with.

Dark, daunting, poignant. I really enjoyed the depiction of the peoples of this debut novel. Cleverly written, in its use of the crime aspect of the story to tell of a dying society's bloody history whilst at the same time celebrating its efforts to reclaim its cultural identity.

However ....

Way too wordy. Definitely one for those for whom this world is a novelty. Die-hard readers of crime investigation novels (I hesitate to use the word thriller) may well find the pace too slow, the attention to minute detail, whether it be the rounding up of the reindeer, the foods stocked up on on a shopping expedition or, even, how someone smoked a cigarette, cloying.