She’s definitely not the Keymaster.

129. Sun Storm – Asa Larsson

Alert: This was also published as The Savage Altar, which is a little bit cooler title and how I ended up checking out two copies of the same book from the library.

Second alert, this is a mystery from the perspective of a tax attorney in Sweden. Not a detective, not a criminal defense lawyer, not a social worker, a tax attorney. Rebecka Martinsson is a tax attorney. It’s like if Louis was the main character in Ghostbusters, but not possessed. It’s actually not as lame as that sounds. It’s just a very interesting narrator choice. She isn’t the only narrator, there is the perspective of the police as well, and the killer a little bit, and Martinsson uses her tax attorney powers to look into aspects of a clearly corrupt religious group, which really is the only way to undermine those groups or organized crime, so, it rang true as such.

I also quite liked Martinsson as a character, she’s responsible and easily annoyed by things that in theory she’d be above being annoyed by, but everyone regresses when they go home. Her home just happens to be a small town with a religious group that’s in charge of a lot of business and land, is totally creepy and predatory (Surprise!), and has their own little deity who gets murdered and was sort of supposed to be Martinsson’s boyfriend at one point when they were young. The deity guy’s sister was her best friend who was and has remained very, very needy and of course refuses all but the will of her god, so, that’s fun to deal with.

It did have quite the ending. Action fest via tax attorney, also unexpected.

Murderface thought about sharing her visions with the world and becoming a deity, but then she got sleepy and found this pillow cave.