Sun Storm
Rebecka Martinsson is a successful Stockholm tax lawyer who has spent two decades running from Kiruna, the Arctic mining town in Swedish Lapland where she grew up, when an early-morning phone call from a childhood friend pulls her back. A charismatic young preacher, the brother of Rebecka's friend Sanna, has been ritually murdered in the local church, and Sanna is the obvious suspect. Working with the pragmatic inspector Anna-Maria Mella, pregnant and weeks from maternity leave, Rebecka is pulled back into the closed-ranks evangelical community that both raised and exiled her. Åsa Larsson's 2003 debut, the first in the Rebecka Martinsson series, is a Nordic noir procedural as much about returning to a place that has not forgiven you as about solving the crime at its center.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Sun Storm
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
First in the Rebecka Martinsson series. When a charismatic preacher is murdered in a church in Kiruna, lawyer Rebecka Martinsson reluctantly returns to her northern Swedish hometown to help his sister, who is suspected.
Sun Storm (Solstorm in Swedish, 2003) was written by Asa Larsson and is the first book in her Rebecka Martinsson series, set in northern Sweden. It is sometimes published in English under the title The Savage Altar.
Asa Larsson has written six main Rebecka Martinsson novels. The series has been adapted into a Swedish TV show with two seasons, available internationally on streaming.
Sun Storm is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Sun Storm takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Sun Storm is a standalone novel by Asa Larsson, not part of a series.
Sun Storm is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.