Betrayal is page-turner. Karin Alvtegen, whose prize-winning novel Missing won prestigious awards when it was published in 2000 (e.g. the Glass Key Award in 2001), has followed up with a new story full of suspense. Betrayal was nominated Best Nordic Crime Novel in 2004 and has become a bestseller across Europe. Alvtegen’s writing reminds me of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. Long before anything happens, you just know something will happen and that it will be ugly. But you don’t know when and to whom it will happen.
Eva, a high-powered executive accustomed to success is married to Henrik, a stay-at-home writer and the father of their young son, Axel. One day Henrik tells her that he wants to end their fifteen-year relationship. He doesn’t ‘have fun anymore’. Gradually a betrayal is revealed. Eva’s world spins out of control.
Jonas, a 25 year old postman, keeps vigil at the bedside of his older girlfriend, Anna, in another part of Stockholm. She has been in a coma for two-and-half years, seemingly following a swimming accident, which in reality is yet another betrayal. Jonas is an obsessive-compulsive loner with a family history also marked by betrayal.
Then Jonas by accident meets the distraught Eva in a bar. Thus the two separate stories converge; betrayals meet betrayals in a new betrayal. Alvtegen’s plot revolves around individuals hurt and seeking remedy and revenge. Out of betrayals emerge obsessions. These too have a place in Betrayal.
In Betrayal, Alvtegen gets inside the minds of her characters and sometimes even describes the same scene from different perspectives. This technique helps build suspense as it allows the action to unfold gradually. The reading experience is interesting. The reader slowly pieces together the story by collecting impressions, information and important clues, coming at the main narrative from different angles.
Betrayal’s plot is powerful, yet Karin Alvtegen’s novel is as much about individual histories and relationships as it is about what actually happens. The multiple betrayals give rise to dynamics that, as a reader, you just know must end in disaster. How, when, for whom, however, are unknowns. There is little violence, but still the suspense is continuously building. Action drives action. There are no punishments and no rewards, there are only consequences.
Praise:
“Karin Alvtegen has once again shown that combining complicated emotions like guilt, regret and deceit with an intelligent and breathtaking plot, is an art she is the master of. In fact, she is telling about an event that occurs to many people every day, but Karin Alvtegen accentuates it and thereby she gives the reader another novel packed with suspense.”
Nerikes Allehanda
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