Echoes From the Dead — Johan Theorin

On a foggy autumn day in the early 1970s, a little boy disappears without a trace from the island of Öland. He is never found.

Twenty years later his mother, Julia, is living on the Swedish mainland, still struggling to come to terms with her son's disappearance. Julia receives an unexpected phone call from her father, a retired sea captain still living on the island who tells her that the postman has delivered a package containing the worn and mended shoe of a child. He is pretty sure it belongs to her son.

Reluctantly Julia returns to the island where she grew up and soon she and her father are piecing together a puzzle from the past. They recall stories of a terrifying local man, Nils Kant, who was known to delight in the pain of others but who was killed during World War Two, while the island had been occupied by the Nazis. Recently, however, there have been reports of a man exactly like Nils Kant wandering across the fields as darkness falls.

From the barren sands of Öland to the Caribbean seas and back, Echoes From the Dead is as chilling as it is psychologically acute -- a gripping study of loss, sorrow and true evil.