WHAT WAS YOURS (ALLT SOM VAR DITT)

After leaving her career behind, journalist Clara Törn is pulled back to the rural Värmland she once escaped, tasked with revisiting a four-year-old murder case. But as she works to unearth the sad facts surrounding the case, Clara is forced to reckon with the haunting landscape, and her own fractured history that won’t let go.

When award-winning journalist Clara Törn abruptly leaves her position as an investigative reporter at SVT Gothenburg, her family and friends assume a failing private life is to blame. But for Clara, it’s freedom that calls to her. Now with her only son moved out, she can finally take control of her own time and life.

Before long, however, she is forced to confront the harsh realities of freelance life in a changing media landscape. Work does not come easily, so she is relieved when Sebastian Ekdahl, a successful former colleague offers her an assignment.

The problem is that it takes her back to Värmland. That is where her childhood remains, along with fractured family ties and the forest that feels ominously alive at night. Clara has avoided returning to Värmland for as long as possible, but when no other jobs appear, she agrees say yes to Sebastian’s offer – to tell the story of seventeen-year-old Eja Lantho, who was murdered by her boyfriend at a residential care home in Stöpafors four years earlier.

Reluctantly, Clara returns to the rural backwoods of Värmland to write about the case. It soon becomes clear that not everyone wants it to be investigated again. As Clara digs deeper into Eja’s death and the the village itself, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate her work from her own fragile past.

What Was Yours is Hanna Jedvik’s first book in the suspense genre and the first book in the series about investigative journalist Clara Törn.

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Sweden: Ordfront

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