Stef Penney creates mysteries and believable characters in her latest novel

The Long Water
Stef Penney
Quercus

Stef Penney has many strengths as a novelist, and one of the greatest — fully on display here — is her ability to gradually build a totally convincing setting peopled by rounded, believable and fascinating characters. She does it whether she is giving her fiction an historical setting or placing it in the present day, as she does in The Long Water.

Here we are in Nordland, a remote area of north Norway, in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. One evening, close to final exams at the high school when all the pupils are letting their hair down before getting stuck into their last academic hurdle, four senior boys go into the mountains for some fun, but only three return. Daniel has gone missing. His companions say he wanted to climb further, and went on alone. He has seemingly vanished into thin air.

Are his friends covering for him? Did something awful happen? If anyone knows, they aren’t saying, and the community is devastated. Telling the story, Penney concentrates on her main characters, particularly elderly, grumpy Svea whose ties to the area are long and deep, but who also has a complicated and interesting past. She has few friends, but one, Odd Emil, is the grandfather of the missing boy. She is also close to her granddaughter, the misfit Elin, who, like Daniel, is a pupil at the local school. Elin’s only close friend is gay Benny. All have issues or memories they would rather remained hidden.

The police, scouring the area, find a body in a disused mine. However, it has been there for a very long time, and is not easy to identify. In addition to the current alarm, old scandals and dramas begin to come to the surface.

It almost feels dismissive to pigeonhole this book as a “crime novel”, or part of the Scandi noir genre, because it is much more than that: not something that should be slotted easily into a category. It is an exploration of a remote, closed society in turmoil and the effects — good and bad — on the people who are part of it. It also considers how everyone’s present is informed by their past. The tension builds to the climax of the novel, creating an entirely satisfying read that will stay with the reader long after any mysteries have been solved.