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.

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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.

1794: The City Between the Bridges , second The Wolf and the Watchman tale, translated by Ebba Segerberg

1794: The City Between the Bridges (The Wolf and the Watchman #2)
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A #1 international bestseller, this atmospheric and breathtaking sequel to the “cerebral, immersive page-turner” (The Washington Post) The Wolf and the Watchman explores the darkness hidden beneath the splendor of 18th-century Stockholm.

Stockholm, 1794: A young nobleman, Eric Three Roses, languishes in a hospital as the rest of the city claims that he belongs in a madhouse. Riddled with guilt, he writes down the memories of his lost love—his beautiful wife who died on their wedding night.

The young woman’s mother also mourns her death and, desperate for justice, begs for help from the only person who will listen to her: Jean Mickel Cardell, the one-armed watchman. But she isn’t the only person seeking him out.

Emil, younger brother to the brilliant lawyer and detective Cecil Winge, finds the watchman to demand his late brother’s pocket watch back. Instead, Cardell enlists Emil’s help to discover what really happened at the Three Roses estate that dreaded wedding night.

The City Between the Bridges: 1794 is a suspenseful race for the truth before it’s too late from an author with a “thrilling, unnerving, clever, and beautiful” (Fredrik Backman, #1 New York Times bestselling author) voice.

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My Review: Splendidly grim; staggeringly brutal.

Really, I could stop typing right there. What you need to know is: The first book isn't a necessity to read before this one, but I recommend it. If that book's truly dreadful crimes don't cause you to blench, this one's won't either plus you'll already know Mickel Cardell...he's central to the point of view of Enlightenment-era Stockholm from below our usual ten-thousand-foot aerie of aristocracy of the mind or the law. History glosses over so much.

The author and the translator must have worked closely together on this series to maintain such a clear sense of the language being used with great exactness and concision. The way the imagery unfolds is gripping, especially in the more awful parts...and there are plenty of them!...so I'm not going to spend a lot of keystrokes specifying the CWs. Trust me, if you need a content warning, you might shouldn't pick this series up. Bodies and minds are abused, ground down, commodified. No one in this book has a shred of a chance at happiness.

If that matters to you, shop elsewhere.

What you'll get in this shop is a very trenchant take on the role of power in corrupting the powerful's souls. What happens when no one can say no to you is never pretty. What happens to others is downright horrifying. It behooves the reader willing to come down the fetid alleys and swim across the reeking canals to realize what dehumanizing and Othering costs the Othered, but also those passively complicit in it.

The manner in which the story is constructed, multiple apparently disconnected viewpoints, isn't at first obviously going to lead us to Stockholm and Mickel. Be patient...it will. But that polyphony that feels so alienating early on is, in the end, an effective tool for conveying the reality of the story to the observing eye of the reader.

I don't for a second think too many will see the ending coming. That is praise, coming from me. I can't honestly say I felt ma'at upheld in the resolution. Because nothing on this wide green Earth can redress the balance of horror and misery unleashed on the people in it. But it doesn't stop being worth the trip.

So no happy happy, joy joy. But a lot of seriously good points being made in prose more than up to the task of delivering the burden of the tale in unforgettable ways.

THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN, grim and deeply disturbing, but unputdownable

THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One morning in the autumn of 1793, watchman Mikel Cardell is awakened from his drunken slumber with reports of a body seen floating in the Larder, once a pristine lake on Stockholm’s Southern Isle, now a rancid bog. Efforts to identify the bizarrely mutilated corpse are entrusted to incorruptible lawyer Cecil Winge, who enlists Cardell’s help to solve the case. But time is short: Winge’s health is failing, the monarchy is in shambles, and whispered conspiracies and paranoia abound.

Winge and Cardell become immersed in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams. From a farmer’s son who is lead down a treacherous path when he seeks his fortune in the capital to an orphan girl consigned to the workhouse by a pitiless parish priest, their investigation peels back layer upon layer of the city’s labyrinthine society. The rich and the poor, the pious and the fallen, the living and the dead—all collide and interconnect with the body pulled from the lake.

Breathtakingly bold and intricately constructed, The Wolf and the Watchman brings to life the crowded streets, gilded palaces, and dark corners of late-eighteenth-century Stockholm, offering a startling vision of the crimes we commit in the name of justice, and the sacrifices we make in order to survive.

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My Review: First, read this:

Under the skin, broken blood vessels wallow like a pack of leeches.
–and–
"You are indeed a wolf after all. I’ve seen enough to know, and even if I am wrong, you will soon become one. No one can run with the wolf pack without accepting its terms. You have both the fangs and the glint of the predator in your eye. You deny the blood thirst, but it rises around you like a stench. One day your teeth will be stained red and then you’ll know with certainty how right I was. Your bite will be deep.”
–and–
"Even sweat smells differently in the face of death, did you know that? Mix it all with gun smoke and you end up with the devil's own perfume."
–and–
The dead man whispered lipless accusations, his voice seething with worms.
"You were to bring me justice but you failed. The other has atoned with his life. You'll be next."

There is a darn sight more body horror, and psychological twists and turns, to this read than you're probably expecting from a series mystery. I do not think this is a typical book in any way, though, so I appreciate the publisher's dilemma in categorizing the book for B&N and Amazon.

It's not unrelievedly grim reading, though:

It is funny how everyone seems to want to help those who need none, while they will take long paths to avoid the need that is evident.
–and–
Those who are not able to make themselves understood simply repeat themselves at a higher volume.

I don't know if this is unique, but it's uncommon: These lines are definitely reflective of Author Natt och Dag's writing style in Swedish because he translated the book himself. CORRECTION! The book was translated by Ebba Segerberg, an able and prolific translator from Swedish to English. I apologize for my error. I do not know if or when the next book in this milieu will come out, but it's entitled 1794. It *has* been two years since it came out in Swedish, though.

Don't so much as twitch toward this book if you're not able to breeze through Stieg Larsson's horrible rape- and gore-filled tomes or Henning Mankell's more violent books about Wallander. In every line and on every page you're going to be challenged, and hard; rape, torture, murder, and a twisted vision of the upper-class privilege corrupting Sweden in its early Enlightenment days. As brutal as any Scandinoir, as evocatively written as Mantel's Sir Thomas More novels, and worth every flinch, gasp, and slamming shut in horror.