Sun Storm

On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies mutilated and defiled–and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall....So begins Åsa Larsson’s spellbinding thriller, winner of Sweden’s Best First Crime Novel Award and an international literary sensation.

Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the town she’d left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm attorney, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the revivalist church his charisma helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor and a dogged policewoman. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark, wrenching, and impossible to guess....

From the Hardcover edition.

When a body is discovered in her hometown, a young Swedish lawyer is called back home, only to become traped in a perilous web of betrayal, suspicion, religious fanaticism, and death, in a suspense novel set against the backdrop of northern Sweden. 25,000 first printing.

Now translated into English for the first time is Larsson's Sun Storm in which a young Swedish lawyer is pulled into a vortex of suspicion and religious fanaticism after she's summoned to her hometown when a body is found. Optioned for a film, Sun Storm is the winner of Sweden's Best First Crime Novel Award.

ASA LARSSON was born in Kiruna, Sweden, in 1966. She studied in Uppsala and lived for some years in Stockholm, but now prefers the rural life with her husband, two children and several chickens. A former tax lawyer, she now writes full time. Dell will publish her next novel, the award-winning The Blood Spilt, in Spring 2007.