I shouldn't. It makes things worse. My chest starts to convulse, I'm breathing too fast, my ribs hitting the ceiling and then retreating. Hitting and retreating. Tuva] is admirably resilient, full of warmth and humour… Her travails may well give sensitive readers nightmares, but that’s a small price to pay for spending time in her exhilarating company.’

I really like this series, like the quirkiness of it and the tension which flows through every book. It is not a fast paced series, nor should it be as that would not fit the setting. It is atmospheric, the author using the landscape and, in this case, the seasons to full effect. The book is set towards the end of the really cold season, but there is still that sense of the darkness that envelops everything, setting a kind a of moody and eerie tone that when coupled with a community of people who can hunt and shoot with a stealth that cannot be matched, it really sets you on edge, not sure what to expect or when. There are certainly a lot of surprises in the book, as well as some elements which seem almost inevitable, and be prepared to be caught unaware when the truth of what happens is revealed as, in true Will Dean style, he takes us right to the edge with a high stakes, jeopardy laden ending that really gets the pulse pumping. One hearing aid gone. The urge to stand is unbearable. I want to get up and walk. I want to spread my arms. and then I nudge my ponytail and switch on my hearing aids but then we are confronted with a very different narrator. I just love that Will Dean can write a thriller, a PROPER whodunnit, a pacey & gory mystery...... that folds into its mix: pear flavoured wine gums, bouts of hayfever in MacDonalds, the rigmorale of changing out of layers of clothing & how a Hillux handles. Will Dean puts the REAL in surreal.Secondly this enables Dean to give an English perspective on some some quirks of language (he is particularly fond of examining the expression “he has a nice economy”), the menacing countryside captured in the book’s title and the hunting based local society. This outside/English based perspective is given some fictional resonance by having his main protagonist as something of an outsider herself – a Swede who lived in England (as an intern at the Guardian no less) and has had the chance to examine her own country’s cultural assumptions and linguistic quirks, and a natural City dweller and internationalist wary of the countryside and insular society in which she now lives.

And across both are laid a local strip club (and former brothel) and rumours of the activities of a high-stakes poker group – all of which emerge to Tuva and the reader as possible clues to the resolution of the new series of murders that are striking the town – all it seems of family-men hunters and all mutilated for their eyes. Thank you to Netgalley and Oneworld Publication for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review. I enjoyed the setting of small town Sweden and the procession of creepy eccentrics lined up as possible culprits. The atmosphere is dark and unsettling and the tension grows steadily with a good, solid ending.Certainly Tuva’s deafness is an important part of the novel – and an interesting one. For example: the sensitivity to sound on the edge of the aural spectrum; the ability to turn off the hearing aid and effectively zone out aurally; the challenges of lip reading; the sensitivity to condescension about speaking skills; and hearing aid battery power as an addition to the 21st century journalists version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – Wifi, GPS, mobile signal and mobile battery. Now he has set wolves on his readers. Wolves with evil eyes and the scent of blood in the air. The setting of this rural part of Sweden with the towns of Visberg and Gavrik (fictional) is just chillingly perfect. The forests have eyes, the river has snakes and there are sisters who make troll dolls. A young woman goes missing within the perimeter of the farm compound. Can Tuva talk her way inside the tight-knit group to find her story? Will Dean builds tension like no-one else I read. (The Last Thing to Burn is a showcase in tension and introduced me to Tuva. What a leap.) I've been hanging off the edge of the cliff that Bad Apples left me on last September with preconceptions of where Will Dean would take us next and was proved so beautifully and perfectly wrong.