This is a neatly plotted book full of stories within stories, which gradually unravel to confound our expectations. The world he has created may initially appear full of enjoyably restful conventions, but any cliches in The Farm exist to wrongfoot us. But Smith, whose mother is Swedish, is playing a long game. The picturesque but boring village ringed by isolated farms a district dominated by a strong but taciturn patriarch the disappearance of a vulnerable young woman, which is uncovered by an unreliable female investigator the veneer of respectability that readers soon begin to suspect masks something rotten in the state of Scandi. The Farm lays out a pattern with which readers have become familiar. It would be easy to accuse Child 44 author Tom Rob Smith, whose latest novel is set between London and rural Sweden, of jumping on the bandwagon. Bestsellers by Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø, Karin Fossum and others, combined with the success of television series The Killing and The Bridge, have confirmed an appetite for all things Scandinavian. Because sensible as Scandinavians may seem, with their Volvos, Marimekko patterns, meatballs and crispbreads, in fiction they are prone to murder. Crime readers are on such friendly terms that they conflate books from Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland under the banner of "Scandi". We know its clean-edged cities and green countryside, we lust after the slickness of its interiors and attempt to emulate the thrown-together knitted elegance of its inhabitants. T hese days we all know Scandinavia well.
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