1795: THE ORDER OF THE FURIES (The Wolf and the Watchman #3) ends the Winge brothers' trip through Enlightenment Stockholm

1795: THE ORDER OF THE FURIES (The Wolf and the Watchman #3)
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The spellbinding and eerie finale to the #1 internationally bestselling “cerebral, immersive” (The Washington Post) historical trilogy follows two unlikely allies as they struggle to end the reign of a powerful cabal of depraved hedonists in 18th-century Stockholm.

For more than a year, brilliant lawyer Emil Winge has dedicated himself to capturing the diabolical Tycho Ceton, with the invaluable assistance of one-armed army veteran and watchman Jean Michael Cardell. Their mission is made more difficult by the ever-increasing paranoia gripping Sweden’s royal family, who fear that a bloody revolution is brewing. A letter with the names of the revolutionary conspirators is said to be in the possession of Anna Stina Knapp, a good friend to Cardell. Now, Anna is missing and Cardell is determined to find her before the secret police take her into custody.

While Winge and Cardell fight for justice and for life, they find themselves caught between powerful enemies—those who will do anything to maintain the status quo, and those who will only be satisfied with its total destruction. Niklas Natt och Dag brilliantly concludes his immersion into the dark and turbulent waters of 18th-century Stockholm.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dark, turbulent story finishes the arc of this series with the finality of an amputation saw. We met Cecil Winge and Mickel Cardell in 1793 as a truly appalling series of crimes come to light. These men, one in the terminal stages of the Great White Plague (tuberculosis) that ravaged the cities of the time, refuse to just accept that human beings can be treated in the vile ways they've seen without any consequences. Solid Enlightenment values on display, then. A human being has innate worth and dignity, and the kind of killing being perpetrated by someone(s) is an affront to that dignity.

It is hard for us to get into that mindset today. The privilege baked into the world we live in is now centered on money as worth and virtue; then it was god-given by birth. Whose vagina you were shoved out of was, forver and ever, the Place you occupied in this world and the next. Is it, I often wonder, better to base stuff on money? I mean, just look at the scum who hoard huge piles of money and get immense privilege! Unlike the old aristocracy, no one prepared them in any way for the responsibility of "high" social position so they waddle about, dribbling crudeness and outgassing idiocy like this wasn't a disgusting display of vulgarity.

Ahem.

Back to the book: The "high-born" people committing the crimes Mickel and the Winge brothers (Emil takes Cecil's place in the last two books of the series) are sufficiently enraged by to pursue them clearly don't have any noblesse oblige in them either. They behave disgustingly, but in private. The results of their disgusting behavior are simply dumped and there's no absolutely clear-cut way to pin it on the perpetrator(s) or to hold them accountable.

It's in the book! That's not me being political!

What happens in this last volume is the culmination of honest, honorable men pursuing justice across a corrupt landscape of privilege and abuse of power. It's a landscape that is absolute in its wins and losses. That is what suits the PTB, after all, since it's their thumbs on the scales of justice. The disgusting crimes, ones that repulse all honorable people of every station, in this book are less...meaty...but just as awful. The essential crime in the entire series, the one thing that unites the books and makes the reader invest in the characters and stories, is the abuse of power by the powerful. The lives of ordinary people are ruined at a whim, are altered for the worse by someone who has no consequences for that alteration. The team who set out to change that are doing so, bit by bit, in the teeth of a gale blown directly at them by men who do not want any precedents to be set that challenge their control.

The fierceness and appalling cruelty of the fight shows that they know the stakes are existential. Lose this one battle against two little nobodies and lose, once and for all, the Absolute Rights they presently enjoy. The force applied to Mickel and the Winges only makes sense when you look at it from the position of those whose power is at stake. The power that the little guys are fighting to take, the justice that they seek for victims cruelly used, is not out of proportion, that is overtly revolutionary, so why is it being resisted so fiercely?

Because once limited, absolute power dissolves. If held accountable for *this* crime, there is no longer immunity, no longer a usable reason to quash future and further reckonings. Why do you think there's something called a "consent decree"? The entire apparatus of Sweden's absolute monarchy topples if these two little men win Justice for the victims they're fighting for!

Do they, in the end, win? Read the book(s), dark and violent as they are, because I'm scared of the Spoiler Stasi. Those women take no prisoners.