The Farm

Starred review from March 31, 2014
At the start of this superior psychological thriller from Thriller Award–winner Smith (Child 44), the narrator, a Londoner known only as Daniel, receives a phone call from his father, who has retired with his wife to a farm in Sweden. The father tells Daniel that his mother is in the hospital. For months, she has been “imagining things—terrible, terrible things.” Before Daniel can fly to Sweden, his father calls again to inform him that she persuaded the doctors to authorize her discharge and has disappeared. As Daniel struggles to accept that news, his mother phones to announce that she’s flying to Heathrow and that everything his father has told him “is a lie.” When she arrives, she offers a complex tale to buttress her conviction that she has been plotted against, leaving Daniel uncertain as to whom and what to believe. Smith keeps the reader guessing up to the powerfully effective resolution that’s refreshingly devoid of contrivances. Agent: Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

May 15, 2014
Mama's gone crazy, daddy's gone crazy, and Smith (Child 44, 2008) has skipped over from Stalin's Russia to the idyllic Swedish countryside for his latest thriller.The change of scene puts Smith squarely atop territory claimed by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and other masters of Scandinavian mayhem. Smith, who has family ties to Sweden, works a customarily Nordic twist, too, by setting family members at one another's throats-and quite unnicely, too. A frantic email ("Nothing else, just my name, an exclamation mark") alerts Daniel to the fact that something is rotten across the North Sea, where Mum has been parked in a hospital while Dad mutters worriedly about her declining mental faculties. Ah, but Mum, who turns up in London, having fled, may not be loony at all. Indeed, she has a bag full of notes about Dad's late-blooming nefariousness: "In this satchel," she intones, "is some of the evidence I've collected over the summer." Evidence of what? Well, out among the cornflowers and hollyhocks, a corpse, maybe more than one, might just lie, for Dad has a kinky, hidden side. Meanwhile, Mum is old-school enough to believe that the fairy-tale world of trolls and goblins lies on the edge of the forest, though her hypotheses about the teenage girl who's gone missing from their bucolic farm town have an eminently practical side. Smith does creepy very well, setting scenes that slowly build in intensity, and he keeps readers guessing about who can and cannot be trusted. He also has a knack for finding the ominous in the picturesque, so a candlelight procession of "women dressed in bridal white" turns into a backdrop for a discovery that Daniel isn't quite prepared to make. And, it being Sweden, even bad guys and red herrings are neat, orderly and eminently polite: "It wasn't enough for Hakan to attack me," notes Daniel. "He wanted my permission to do so."They're resourcefully lethal as well. A satisfying mystery on ground that, though familiar, manages to yield surprises in Smith's skillful telling.

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June 1, 2014

The author's first stand-alone novel after his wildly successful Soviet-era trilogy (Child 44; The Secret Speech; Agent 6) hits the ground running. While living in the London flat of his partner, Daniel receives an urgent phone call from his father in Sweden. His mother, Tilde, has been committed to an asylum, believing she is the target of a local conspiracy. No sooner does Daniel get to the airport than his phone rings again: "Everything that man has told you is a lie," Tilde says. "I'm about to board a flight to London." A shocked Daniel spends the rest of the novel listening, as his paranoid mother methodically unspools a story about an elaborate plot set in the Swedish wilderness, which includes an officious neighbor, a missing girl, and a buried secret from Tilde's past. Daniel, like us, can barely believe what he's hearing, but soon gets wrapped up in the mystery himself. VERDICT The unreliability of Tilde's narration--is she telling the truth about this sinister scheme or is she crazy?--provides the novel with a constant tension, but her deliberate and frustrating withholding of information also keeps it from truly taking off. Still, this is a worthy addition to the growing canon of Scandinavian crime thrillers that also includes Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo. [Smith's mother is Swedish.--Ed.; See Prepub Alert, 1/6/14.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

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