Review: Bad Apples, by Will Dean

A murder
A resident of small-town Visberg is found decapitated in the forest
A festival
An isolated hilltop community celebrates ’Pan Night’ after the apple harvest
A race against time
As Visberg closes ranks, there could not be a worse time for Tuva Moodyson to arrive as deputy editor of the local newspaper. Tuva senses the scoop of her career, unaware perhaps that she is the story…

Set in Sweden’s Halloween season, when the forests are full of elk
hunters and the town of Visberg is thick with the aroma of rotting fruit, BAD
APPLES is a thrilling introduction for readers new to the series, and for
die-hard #TeamTuva fans, a heart-stopping rollercoaster…

YouTube: Will Dean – Forest Author

My Review

Thanks to Anne for organising this blog tour, and to Point Blank Crime for sending me a copy of the novel. Love the acid green cover and the coaster they sent me.

Tuva is back in Gavrik for good, working as assistant editor at the town weekly and covering the rural town of Visberg. It’s a weird enclave of filthy rich people and the less well off who run around after them, on top of a hill, with only one winding road in, and surrounded by pine forest. It’s hunting season, but Tuva isn’t hunting deer. There’s a killer in the woods.

And someone obsessed with teeth. Corpses missing heads, animals with perfect dentistry. A town obsessed with the things they keep in the self-storage building.

I don’t know where Will gets this stuff from; I worry about his sanity. It’s all those pines he lives surrounded by.

I sat down to read this book, thinking I’d read for a couple of hours and then go to bed.

Thant didn’t happen. Six hours later, I finished it and now it’s nearly two in the morning, Ezzie is asking me when we’re going up to bed and I should probably save writing this until it’s at least day light and my hands work properly, but I really need to tell you all how much I loved this book.

I was gripped, couldn’t put it down. Page turner, thrilling. All those other superlatives people use for a really good read.

I like Tuva and her friends, they are complex, interesting people and the other characters are fascinating. Tuva’s own journey, of grieving and coming to understand the complex nature of her trauma, and the relationships she’s building which help her to heal are as gripping as the actual murder and crimes.

I’m pretty sure the police Chief is dodgy in some way, or at least he was covering for the Erlunds. That entire family have ‘inbreeds’ written all over them. There’s something odd about most of the people in Visberg.

Also, Pan Night is utterly weird and I loved it as a concept. I wouldn’t want to get involved, but it’d be entertaining to watch from a distance.

The resolution was unexpected but the hints were there. Red herrings that weren’t red herrings after all. It was very tense and I was desperate to know how Tuva would solve the mystery and then escape.

Thank goodness for importunate neighbours who need a babysitter. And Noora’s accurate shooting.

I was rather shocked by the very last sentence. I need to know what’s happened!

The writing is excellent, highly descriptive, occasionally even poetic. The juxtaposition of the weird with the mundane or a poetic description followed by a blunt remark, is evocative and jarring, in a good way.

Highly recommended, tense thriller.

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Author Bio

WILL DEAN grew up in the East Midlands and lived in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. His debut novel, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s Book Club, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and named a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. The second Tuva Moodyson thriller, Red Snow, won ‘Best Independent Voice’ at the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, 2019, and was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2020. The third novel, Black River, has been longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2021. Rights for the series have been sold in eight territories (France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Poland, Czech Republic, China and Turkey). Will lives in Sweden where the Tuva Moodyson novels are set.
TV Rights to Dark Pines have been optioned by Lionsgate, the producers of Mad Men, with plans for a multi-part series featuring Tuva Moodyson