Review: 'The Mountain King'

The Mountain King
By Anders de la Motte
Scandinavian thriller
Atria Books
January 2024

Two young people in Sweden who enjoy exploring abandoned buildings learn of an underground bunker in which there is cave rain. Their secret expedition there is thrilling. At first.

In Swedish crime author Anders de la Motte's new series debut, The Mountain King, the two now missing young people become the subjects of an intense police investigation. The young woman is part of an influential, rich family. Serious Crimes leader Leo Asker begins her work but before she really gets going, she is taken off the case and loses her position. This is thanks to internal politics, a scorned former lover and her attorney mother, who represents the rich family.

Asker is sent downstairs, literally, to a department of lost souls and abandoned projects. Readers of Jussi Adler-Olsen's Department Q books will recognize where she lands. Her new staff is introduced in bits and pieces, as the plot requires their appearance. Their supervisor, who Asker is temporarily replacing, is in hospital after suffering a heart attack at home. His musty office is not the location of a go-getter. But when Asker is contacted by someone involved in a case he was working on, she is drawn in.

The president of a small model railway association calls when a new scale model of people are dropped into a large recreation of the region. They resemble the missing couple. They are not the first models dropped into the layout. Asker realizes the others, and the latest, are all victims of the same person.

Because the reader learns about that person in first-person chapters going back to his youth, it's now up to the reader, and Asker, to figure out what character is that person kidnapping and keeping people. He calls himself the Mountain King, and keeps people captive to make them him. It started with keeping a butterfly in a jar until it died, when its hope was gone.

An old friend of Asker's, an architecture professor who has written about urban exploration of abandoned buildings, is drawn into the story. The missing young man in the opening expedition is one of his students. Is he the Mountain King? Or is he who he seems? What about the police officer who lives near where the two young people disappeared? Can he be trusted? Can any of the police on the unit with Asker's former lover now in charge be trusted? What about her new colleagues?

That Asker has trust issues is not due just to the selfish people she encounters in this story. Her father was a survivalist who trained her in hard-core missions. When she was a teen, there was an explosion on a boat that he forced her onto in the middle of the night in one training session.

de la Motte, author of The Seasons quartet and The Game trilogy, is skillful at drawing introducing a large case of characters. He also knows how to pace a story in which the suspense gets more intense as it races toward its conclusion. Information is revealed just as it becomes necessary to the story. Attention given to character backgrounds and motivations pays off. A second book in this new series is set up at the end of this debut.

The Mountain King is the kind of novel readers long acquainted with the richness of Scandinavian crime fiction will enjoy, and a decent introduction to those just discovering this geographical subgenre.