Following in the footsteps of prize-winning authors Arnuldar Indridason and Henning Mankell, comes a chilling new voice in European crime.

On a foggy autumn day in the early 1970s, a little boy disappears without a trace from the island of Oland. He is never found.

Twenty years later his mother, Julia, is living on the Swedish mainland, still struggling to come to terms with her son's disappearance. Julia receives an unexpected phone call from her father, a retired sea captain still living on the island who tells her that the postman has delivered a package containing the worn and mended shoe of a child. He is pretty sure it belongs to her son.

Reluctantly Julia returns to the island where she grew up and soon she and her father are piecing together a puzzle from the past. They recall stories of a terrifying local man, Nils Kant, who was known to delight in the pain of others but who was killed during World War Two, while the island had been occupied by the Nazis. Recently, however, there have been reports of a man exactly like Nils Kant wandering across the fields as darkness falls.

From the barren sands of Oland to the Caribbean seas and back, Echoes From the Dead is as chilling as it is psychologically acute — a gripping study of loss, sorrow and true evil.

"Set predominantly on the Baltic island of land, Theorin's deeply disturbing debut will remind many of Henning Mankell both in its thematic intensity and dark tone. Two decades after the unsolved disappearance of a young boy, Jens Davidsson, who vanished one foggy autumn afternoon in 1972 and was presumed to have drowned, Jens's grandfather, Gerlof, a retired sea captain, receives one of Jens's sandals in the mail. Gerlof enlists his alcoholic daughter, Julia, who's still struggling to come to grips with the loss of her only child, to help solve the mystery. All leads point to infamous thug Nils Kant, who was rumored to have killed numerous people. But Kant allegedly died years before the fateful day that Jens disappeared, so who could've killed the boy? And why? Further investigation leads the unlikely sleuths to some startling revelations about their isolated island community and its much-storied history." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

“Will remind many of Henning Mankell both in its thematic intensity and dark tone.”—Publishers Weekly

On a gray September day, on an island off the coast of Sweden, six -year -old Jens Davidsson ventured out of his backyard, walked out into a fog, and vanished….Now twenty years have passed, and in this magnificent debut novel of suspense—a runaway bestseller in Sweden—the boy’s mother returns to the place where her son disappeared, drawn by a chilling package sent in the mail… In it, lovingly wrapped, is one of Jens’ sandals—sandals Julia Davidsson put on her son’s feet that very last morning.

Now, with only a handful of clues, Julia and her father are questioning islanders who were present the day Jens vanished—and making a shocking connection to Öland’s most notorious murder case: the killing spree of a wealthy young man who fled the island and died years before Jens was even born. Suddenly the island that once seemed so achingly familiar turns strange and dangerous… Until Julia finds herself facing truths she never imagined—about what really happened on that September day twenty years ago, about who may have crossed paths with little Jens in the fog, and how a child could truly vanish without a trace…until now.

Johan Theorin was born in 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has spent every summer of his life on northern Oland. He is a journalist and scriptwriter. His second novel, Night Blizzard, will be published by Delacorte in 2009.