1793: The Wolf and the Watchman

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What to expect

Best Debut, The Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award 2017

'Thrilling, unnerving, clever and beautiful' Fredrik Backman

The year is 1793, Stockholm. King Gustav of Sweden has been assassinated, years of foreign wars have emptied the treasuries, and the realm is governed by a self-interested elite, leaving its citizens to suffer. On the streets, malcontent and paranoia abound.

A body is found in the city's swamp by a watchman, Mickel Cardell, and the case is handed over to investigator Cecil Winge, who is dying of consumption. Together, Winge and Cardell become embroiled in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams, and one death will expose a city rotten with corruption beneath its powdered and painted veneer.

The Wolf and the Watchman depicts the capacity for cruelty in the name of survival or greed - but also the capacity for love, friendship, and the desire for a better world.

(P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critics Review

A remarkable debut novel
Sunday Times
A gripping, shocking read
The Times
This gripping historical thriller surely announces the arrival of a fine new European talent. Vivid and absorbing
Observer
The latest Scandi sensation
Sunday Times
Niklas Natt och Dag takes the contemporary Scandinavian crime story and gives it a startlingly gruesome historical twist . . . Natt och Dag spares us nothing, detailing horror after horror in his unflinchingly muscular prose
Guardian
Natt och Dag's description of the rattling, lung-shredding tubercular cough is truly hideous - a haunting portrait of physical disintegration that's not easy to forget
Dan Jones, Evening Standard
Swedish noir doesn't get much darker
Herald
A superbly detailed historical mystery
Irish Times
A well-depicted historical murder mystery filled with cruelty as well as warmth and humanity
Best Debut, Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award 2017
A historical thriller that is unparalleled in suspense and literary quality. It's raw, beautiful, heartbreaking and extremely captivating until the very last page. The Wolf and the Watchman deserves a place among the classics of the genre
Erik Axl Sund, author of The Crow Girl
An unexpected masterpiece, a wild and unusual mix of genres that in one fell swoop succeeds in renewing the entire crime fiction genre
Arne Dahl, prize-winning and Swedish #1 bestselling author of the Sam Berger series
Brawny, bloody, intricate, enthralling - and the best historical thriller I've read in twenty years
A J Finn, #1 bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
This is a thrilling, unnerving, clever and beautiful story. Reading it is like giving a little gift to oneself
Fredrik Backman
An impressive thriller - well paced, well structured and deeply unsettling . . . political scheming and psychological angst, grand theories on the state of man, a fiendish masterplan and a love story all in one
TLS

User Reviews

Book 5.0
Narration 5.0
5.0
5.0
Wonderful book. I would not have survived in 1793. Conditions and extreme cruelty conspired to make existence as miserable an existence as can be imagined.

The story is clever, intriguing and complex. It follows the hunt for those responsible for a dismembered mutilated corpse dumped in the city waters.
ece69 03/08/2022

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