Uneven Scandi thriller loses its way after a hundred pages

For its first hundred or so pages, Niklas Natt och Dag’s debut novel is a publisher’s (and a reader’s) dream, but then it all goes awry

Niklas Natt och Dag’s latest novel flatters to deceive in the end PIc: Gabriel Liljevall

Fiction: The Wolf and the Watchman; By Niklas Natt och Dag; Translated by Ebba Segerberg; John Murray, €14.95

Cecil Winge is a freelance consulting detective. His beat? The mean streets of Stockholm. The year? 1793. Winge is dying of tuberculosis (he spends quite a lot of the novel coughing into a bloodstained hanky). In moments of tension, he browses the shelves of a photographically memorised library in search of soothing lines from Ovid. ...