Something felt familiar when I started reading Peter Mays novel Ett kallt fall in Swedish the other day. I felt that I already knew the story about Enzo MacLeod and the bet to solve the ten year old mystery with the missing professor.
After a few chapters I was certain, I had read this before. That’s sometimes happens when you read in multiple languages, sometimes it turns out you’ve already read the book in it’s original form. In this caste Dry Bones (or Extraordinary People as it’s also called).
Do I mind?
Not at all, at least not with Peter Mays books. I do like them, I simply could not stop reading Harris Tweed, Entry Island and Coffin Road, and this is also an un-put-downable book.
Dry Bones is the first book about Enzo, formerly one of Scotland’s top forensic scientists, now a university professor in Toulouse, France. Somehow May succeeds in keeping his own signature style while combining it with that French feeling when it comes to environment, story, smell and pace which I’ve learned to love in the French books I love so much.
The combination of a bet, a cold case and the French je ne sais quoi feels so good. With his somewhat odd hero May tells us about a missing person case that turns into a hunt for a murderer.
Dry Bones is the first of six about Enzo MacLeod and the first one in Swedish. I can assure you that I will not have the patience to wait for the others to be translated, I want to read more about Enzo now.
