Red Snow by Will Dean, Book Review

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I love snow globes, so it’s not surprising that I was completely taken with the setting of Red Snow, Gavrik, an isolated small town during a very cold winter in the north of Sweden.  You can tell the author is English as he’s so enthralled with the extreme cold and the snow, the struggle with dry skin, driving challenges, and the many thermal layers you have to keep putting on and taking off. Those of us who have lived in northern climes, are more blasé about a bit of frostbite and cars that need jump-starting. It’s therefore somewhat idiosyncratic to experience the foreigner’s excitement with the extreme cold expressed by the main protagonist, Tuva Moodyson, a young Swedish female journalist who writes for the local paper, combining serious investigative journalism with ice hockey reports and ‘local man falls off ladder’ stories.


You might imagine Gavrik, a town of 9,000 taciturn Swedes, to be monochrome in terms of character development, but Will Dean has imported enough diversity to satisfy even the most woke Londoner. Our heroine is part Sami, deaf and bi-sexual, her love interest is second generation Middle Eastern and her best friend is from Thailand and has a food truck which serves exotic and spicy Thai food. My favourite characters however, are the eccentric members of the appropriately named Grimberg family who own the local liquorice factory and who have a dark history of family tragedy. The female members of the family, spanning three generations, live out a weird combination of witchcraft and extreme privacy with a protestant sense of duty and a flair for flamboyant fashion. The gothic towers of the ageing liquorice factory dominate the landscape in the same way that the Grimbergs dominate the livelihood of most of the inhabitants of this bleak place.


And don’t think that nothing ever happens in this out-of-the way town – human nature, being what it is, controls the actions of people here as well, and Tuva finds herself trying to figure out who the murderer is with the hashtag ‘Ferryman’, as one of the corpses is found with two liquorice coins on its dead eyes. The trouble with being a snoopy journalist is that you often end up in serious trouble, and it catches up with you when you least expect it.

The excellent Red Snow is the second novel by Will Dean and the second outing of his complicated and guilt-ridden heroine Tuva Moodyson. It was published by Point Blank in paperback (£8.99) in October 2019.


Will Dean studied law at LSE and worked in London before settling in rural Sweden, where he built a wooden house at the centre of a vast elk forest. His first novel, Dark Pines, was shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize and name a Telegraph book of the year.

(T Forsyth-Moser)