El verano se presenta tranquilo y placentero en la isla sueca de Öland. Sin embargo, el paisaje y las costumbres han cambiado: hace años era un lugar familiar y modesto, donde muchos veraneaban en el camping regentado por el bueno de John, pero ahora parece que los turistas prefieren el lujoso balneario de la familia Kloss. El viejo y entrañable Gerlof pasa el verano allí, cuidando de sus nietos, cuando se producen una serie de terribles incidentes que, una vez más, le obligarán a tomar medidas drásticas.

Updated this book on Booklikes with the right cover and that meant that the review was updated here on GR. And, since I wrote the review in Swedish when I read the book a couple of years ago did I write a English review of it now.

Svensk recension:

Rörgast (The Öland Quartet, #4) Efter Sankta Psyko som jag verkligen, verkligen inte gillade så känns det skönt att läsa en Theorin bok som är lika bra som de föregående han skrivit. Härlig spännande stämning, intressant story och bra karaktärer! Jag tycker om att Theorin faktiskt lyckades överraska mig, ibland känns det som om det är för lätt att lista ut handlingen i en bok, men denna tog en vändning som jag inte hade redan gissat.

And here is the English review:

It felt good reading this book after the really bad Santa Psyko. This book has a really good and thrilling story and I loved the characters. Sometimes I feel that books just don't surprise me much any longer so I'm always happy when a book manage to really turn the story around and surprise me. ( )

Helt ok deckare. Det är ett långsamt och avkopplande tempo genom hela boken och det är hyfsat spännande. ( )

Oland is a sleepy island off the Baltic coast of Sweden. Most of the year the locals survive through agriculture and fishing but the island comes alive in the summer as the tourists invade. Eager to make the most of this bonanza the powerful Kloss family have developed a luxury resort on their land. Young Jonas Kloss is visiting his father on a working holiday and one evening he goes out in a small boat, however disaster strikes and his dinghy is mown down by a large ship that appears out of the gloom. The boat, its zombie-like crew and it's illegal cargo are linked to the Kloss family but also to the Homecomer, a man bent on revenge, and Gerlof, a retired seafarer who knows Oland and its people very well.

Starting off in simple and sleepy way, this book ratchets up the excitement and tension all the way to the excellent denouement and epilogue. Oland is old-fashioned and deceptively quiet and that's how the story starts, with an old tale about a burial and with the influx of people to the island for the summer. The backstories of the characters are beautifully handled, some are very explicit such as the Homecomer's life during his exile, some are merely hinted at such as the relationship between Gerlof and John or the reason that Lisa has to steal. By the time that Jonas has encountered the ghost ship, the reader is hooked and the strands begin to come together. This is a beautifully written book that also manages to offer an original take on Scandic-Noir. ( )

I loved the previous three books in Theorin's Öland Quartet. The man is a master at creating complex characters and building suspense. Unfortunately The Voices Beyond fell flat for me. Gerlof was still his charming curmudgeonly self with his loneliness and painfully aching legs, and young Jonas was wonderfully complex as well. And that setting! Theorin is also a master at building a setting so vivid and detailed that it counts as one of the characters in his books.

Where the book fell flat was in its pacing. The point of view was constantly shifting from Gerlof to Jonas to a young musician named Lisa to the Homecomer himself who spoke both from the present day and from the time of Stalin's reign of terror. The constant shifting didn't confuse me at all, but the very short chapters moving from one character to the next actually slowed the pace down to a crawl and made the book a chore to read.

As a whole, would I still recommend the Öland Quartet? Yes, I would. The first three (Echoes from the Dead, The Darkest Room, and The Quarry) are superb, and who knows? The slow pace of The Voices Beyond may not bother you at all. For anyone with a fondness for Scandinavian crime fiction, evocative settings, and complex characters, Johan Theorin's Öland Quartet should not be missed. ( )