The Order of the Furies: 1795 (The Wolf and the Watchman Book 3)
This is the third in a trilogy set in 18th-century Stockholm, and a fitting finale to a tale that is pervasively dark, gripping, and a standout in the genres of both historical and crime fiction. The Order of the Furies picks up with Jean Mickel Cardell, war veteran and watchman. The one-armed Cardell may be broken-down, but he’s still a dangerous blunt instrument. The problem is that he’s lost the foil who made his crime-solving possible in the first novel – the incisive investigator Cecil Winge, who has died of tuberculosis. Cardell has joined forces with Winge’s brother, Emil, who is perhaps as intelligent as Cecil, but suffers from debilitating alcoholism and mental illness. Together, they have been on the trail of a malefactor who is a member of the Furies, a “cabal of depraved hedonists” who will stop at nothing to gratify their horrific lusts, leaving mutilated and murdered innocents in their wake.
It’s difficult to encapsulate the plot of this work because it builds on the two novels that preceded it, which are prerequisites to understand this book. Plotting is complicated, the reader is never condescended to, and Natt och Dag’s writing is the very best of show rather than tell. He paints pictures with his words that will linger. Throughout this series, he has created characters that seem capable of stepping right off the page, were they not mired in the hellscape that is the City Between the Bridges. To say the setting is immersive is an understatement, so be warned that Natt och Dag’s Stockholm is a place readers may find disturbing. Corruption and degeneracy are constants, and the deeds some of its inhabitants commit are unspeakable. This is historical fiction of a kind seldom seen in the genre’s current landscape: beautifully written, darkly realistic, and deeply absorbing.
