Sneaky Peek: This Land is No Stranger ... Sarah Hollister and Gil Reavil

This Land Is No Stranger  Blurb

With a career that is spiraling out of control and a nasty drug habit that has taken her to rock bottom, NYC detective Veronika Brand is looking for a way out. When a call from Sweden interrupts her personal chaos, the foreign tongue of her distant Swedish relatives pulls her across the Atlantic with the lure of adventure and escape. But what she finds is far from the idyllic picture her grandmother painted. Instead of long languid summers basking in the midnight sun, she unearths secrets long since buried in the frozen ground.

 In Krister Hammar, a local Sami land rights lawyer, she thinks she has found a kindred spirit. But when they stumble upon a brutal murder scene in a manor house owned by the rivals of her family, she starts questioning his truth. She finds herself being moved like a chess piece between the desolate region of Härjedalen in the north and the steely-cold streets of Stockholm, scrambling to find the links between her family history, a trail of missing Roma girls, and a series of vicious murders.

 In unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the law, Veronika has her sights set only on the beast that preys on the wicked. Will she be able to see past the lure of the northern lights to the dark secrets that threaten to destroy her?

Sneaky Peek Extract

CHAPTER FOUR

Later in the evening, Brand escaped the crush. She wandered the low-ceilinged second floor of the old house. The alcohol-and-Adderall mix foxed her brain. She thought that if someone didn’t put her to bed soon she would drop where she stood. The hangover from the speed darkened her mood. I should not have come, she told herself.

Seeking to clear her head, she stepped out onto a small balcony, warding off the cold with a shawl fashioned from a blanket taken from one of the upstairs bedrooms. She wanted to see the stars again.

There was no moon, and no aurora. The Milky Way swept from horizon to horizon in a celestial wake of blue-white starlight. In the yard below, deep snow sparkled like piled diamonds. The red-painted outbuildings showed dark against the white landscape.

The man she had noticed earlier, her fellow outsider, emerged onto the little balcony. “Ah, here you are,” he said.

“Here I am,” she responded. They both took a moment to gaze up at the extravagant night sky.

He broke the silence. “Barns are painted red because of the chemistry of exploded stars.”

She glanced over at him. “Is that right?”

“No, really, it’s true,” he said. “When stars collapse, they leave behind dust, what we call ferrous oxide. There’s a lot of iron in the earth. This ferrous oxide colors the paint red. And red paint is cheap. You know, farmers like cheap.”

“That’s right,” Brand said, laughing. “That’s true all over the world. My Dalgren grandparents were farmers.”

“That was Jamestown, New York, right?”

Her smile faded. “Everyone here knows so much more about me than I do about them.”

“Krister Hammar,” the man said, giving a curt bow. “You and I are not blood-related. My wife was a Dalgren, my connection to the family is by choice.”

“Was? Is she here?”

“She is…she died five years ago now. Her name was Tove.”

Brand gave a brief consoling nod. They both went inside. Leaning against the wall was a framed, colored print, a highly stylized portrait of a man holding aloft a book and wearing a narrow-brimmed cap. The print had a throwback air of Soviet realism.

“Is this who I think it is?”

“If you are thinking it’s Vladimir Lenin, then yes.”

Brand nodded. “So, the barns are painted red because of ferrous oxide, is it? Not ‘red,’ as in political reds?”

“I believe our hosts might have hidden away Comrade Lenin so as not to offend a visiting American. That piece used to hang proudly out in the hall.”

“Have I fallen in among communists? I am shocked, shocked.”

“I don’t know if you were aware of it back then, but you had fallen in among Soviet-style communists when you spent time with your grandparents. Gustav and Klara were not just painted red, they were red through and through.”

“In my childhood, they kept their beliefs to themselves,” Brand said.

“Yes, the political atmosphere was dangerous for communists when they emigrated to America—to speak out was dangerous. I read where J. Edgar Hoover, your FBI director, used to pronounce the word ‘common-ism.’”

“You know a lot about America.”

“I went to school there. Boston College, international relations. I came back here to study law. Immigrant rights.”

“You must be overwhelmed with all the immigration action here lately. And what, are you barn-red yourself?”

“Well, I guess I’m left, liberal, like most of the Dalgren family is now. Though if you dig deeper, you’ll find some of the old guard. Didn’t Gustav and Klara speak to you about anything?”

Brand gazed out the window. “Grandma Klara used to talk about this, the night sky in Sweden,” she said quietly.

The two of them gazed up at the starry night for a long beat. “Most of us live in cities,” he said. “We don’t often stop to look up at the stars, too busy looking down at phones. They say this type of situation breeds atheism.”

“So that’s what causes it!” Brand said, laughing again.

“How could you not believe in something bigger than yourself, looking up at this every night?”

Brand turned to face him directly. “Where are you from?” she asked. “What part of Sweden?”

“As far north as you can go. At least, that’s where I was born. You call it Lapland.”

“Reindeer,” Brand said. “Santa Claus.”

“Yes, although nowadays the Sami people—my people, my mother was Sami— herd reindeer with motocross bikes, and the tourists jet in on package tours, cramming in the obligatory culture stop before skipping over to Finland’s more coveted Santa’s workshop. There are two of them, competing with each other to attract customers.”

Brand appraised the man openly. “I felt there was something about you. I’ve never fit in anywhere either. I don’t think I’m doing so well with this crowd.”

“Give them a chance,” Hammar said.

They stood in uncomfortable silence. Brand had the sense the man had something to get off his chest. She tried to wait him out.

“I'm tired” she said finally. “I think I need to go to bed.”

“Listen, just now I have a case,” Hammar said abruptly. “A young girl, a Romani teenager named Varzha who has disappeared. Because she is an immigrant, no one cares to look for her.”

“Romani?”

“Gypsy, as you say. Her disappearance may be part of a pattern. I thought since you’ve worked against traffickers in America…” He trailed off.

Brand stared. “Oh, hell no,” she said. “You want me to look into this disappearance of yours?”

“Your knowledge, as a New York City detective, here among us, such expertise could be invaluable.”

“You have police in this country, am I correct?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And I assume they investigate disappearances?”

“Well, yes. But—”

Brand cut him off. “Then that’s the best course of action. I’m a big fan of letting people do their jobs.”

“Okay, of course, of course,” Hammar said quickly. “And you must have your own thing while you are in Sweden.”

“That’s right, I have my own thing.”

“Americans are never without their own thing,” Krister said. “Yes, right. This gypsy girl, she is of no importance.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Veronika exclaimed, mildly irritated at last. “I think we ought to leave Comrade Lenin and the gypsies and head back downstairs.”

“All right.” Hammar sighed. “We don’t want your people to think we’re conspiring up here.”

They turned towards the stairs. The largest room on the second floor was more like a hallway, long and narrow and running half the length of the house. Brand noticed the wooden floorboards were over three feet wide. That had to mean they had been milled a very long time ago, from timber taken out of old-growth forest. Everything was painted white, walls and floor both.

The rise and fall of Dalgren voices still sounded from downstairs. Brand wondered where she was going to sleep. Maybe right where she stood would do just fine. She felt so tired she was dizzy.

Hammar headed toward the stairway. He turned back around. “They didn’t translate what she said exactly right.”

Brand couldn’t summon the effort to understand what Hammar was talking about. She was worn out. Fatigue, she knew from long nights spent on police casework, could develop into an almost hallucinatory state.

“The old woman,” Hammar explained. He stood poised at the top of the stairs. “They told you that Elin said you’re here to catch the bad guys. But she didn’t say exactly that.”

He wanted Brand to ask him what Elin Dalgren had really meant. She remained standing in place. She felt unsteady on her feet, as though the room was swaying slightly.

“She said you were here to kill the devil.”

Brand didn’t understand. In the far corner of the room stood a children’s bed, more of a divan really, piled with pillows and a stuffed toy gorilla. She crossed to it and impulsively laid down. Her mind shut off as she listened to Hammar’s footsteps receding down the stairs.

AUTHOR BIO

Sarah Hollister i

s an American writer and playwright, living the Scandinavian reality on
one of the 24,000 islands in the Swedish archipelago near Stockholm. Her plays Sisters’ Dance and Relative Truth have been produced in New York City, and she is a member of the Dramatikerförbund (Sweden’s drama guild), which awarded her residences at the Henning Mankell House in northern Sweden. She is a founding member of the Stockholm Writers Festival. A New York-based screenwriter and journalist, Gil Reavill often writes about crime, both in fiction, with the “13” series of thrillers (13 Hollywood Apes, 13 Stolen Girls, 13 Under the Wire) and non-fiction, with Mafia Summit and Aftermath, Inc. Reavill also co-wrote the screenplay for the corrupt-cop feature film, Dirty, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.