The Living and the Dead

Small towns sometimes have a voice of their own.

On a snowy winter night in 1999, Sander and Killian leave a house party together outside a small town in rural Sweden. The very best of friends, the two seventeen-year-olds imagine they will remain so forever. But by the next morning, a corpse is found in the trunk of a car, and each boy is a suspect in the murder. Each has something they want to conceal from the police. And from the other.

The hunt for the killer will take more than twenty years. It will see the lead detective leave the force forever. And it won't end until a second body turns up in similar circumstances, and the tight-knit community's secrets are finally brought to light.

In The Living and the Dead, renowned criminologist Christoffer Carlsson masterfully transports us to the fields and forests of western Sweden, a region of farmers and truck drivers torn apart by economic injustice and self-deceit -- a world where the portal between the living and the dead is flung wide open and where no one is entirely innocent.