The Blue Place

Science fiction writer Nicola Griffith, winner of the Nebula and Tiptree Awards, proves that good writing transcends genre. The Blue Place is a spare, cold suspense thriller--Norwegian noir--with the kind of strong, enigmatic characters that made Griffith's Slow River such a great read. Aud Torvingen is a former cop, martial artist, and Scandinavian to the core. She stalks powerfully through the streets of Atlanta and the fjords of Norway in search of an art thief and killer. At first, she frightens us a bit, because she insistently imagines how easy it would be to kill almost everyone she meets. Having descended more than once into that dark, cold psychic realm wherein violence provides primal pleasure, Aud is constantly wary of her fellow human beings. But our fear turns to fascination as she finds herself falling in love with Julia, a smart, beautiful art dealer mixed up in the crime, and getting closer to finding the center of the danger in the icy north.

As in Slow River and Ammonite, Griffith's attention is often on the bodies of her characters--their awareness of skin and muscle, sinew and bone suffuses the action. Griffith closely scrutinizes their deeper inner workings, their emotions and logic, as well. The story is tense and gripping, as a good thriller should be, but the best part of The Blue Place is Aud's fascinatingly familiar search for self. --Therese Littleton