One of his deaf friends reads the Tuva books before they are published, while a Vietnamese friend read The Last Thing to Burn in its early stages. This is my first Tuva Moodyson (I hadn't realised it was a series) although I've read Will Dean's excellent work previously. I have to say it's not essential that you read the earlier ones but I always like to start at the beginning. I think in this case it might help. I have read all the compelling Tuva Moodyson thrillers by Will Dean and am always glad to learn there is a new addition to the series. Tuva is an engaging character. She is a deaf newspaper reporter working in small towns in the north of Sweden. We feel the cold chill in the remote area, surrounded by dark forests where wolves and elk abound, and the nearby marshes and Snake River. Certainly Tuva’s deafness is an important part of the novel – and an interesting one. For example: the sensitivity to sound on the edge of the aural spectrum; the ability to turn off the hearing aid and effectively zone out aurally; the challenges of lip reading; the sensitivity to condescension about speaking skills; and hearing aid battery power as an addition to the 21st century journalists version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – Wifi, GPS, mobile signal and mobile battery. What starts out as a missing person's case soon turns into something more sinister as a body is discovered. Suddenly the idyllic Rose Farm becomes a hotbed of resentment, and jealousy, as the disparity between the picture they present to the world and what actually happens there widens and is exposed.

Rose Farm is home to a group of survivalists, completely cut off from the outside world. Until now. Bad Apples is noir at its very best… If you like “heart in your mouth” reads that will keep you up all night with all the lights on, then this is for you.’ Dean built their home himself, making money with a sideline in repairing vintage watches. Keeping the idea to himself, he began thinking about writing.Lars told me once that his TV is his best friend and his broadband connection is his family, especially in the winter months. He said they keep him going. TV and coffee and alcohol: the holy trinity of cold countries. This is sort of more of problem 6, but our character is dislikeable in still another way. She's a preacher. Apparently it's not nice to compliment a deaf person on their speaking skills. Even if it's meant to be a compliment, "it's just f***ing not" she says (actual quote) and shame on you, reader, for thinking anything else. You are the bad guy here. You because you're not deaf, you're not bisexual, your best friend isn't Thai, you're not half Sami and you may not be female. As for characters…this book was RICH with some fantastic, well developed characters that had me curious throughout! I wanted to know EVERYTHING about them – and Will Dean did not disappoint. I will mention just a few though as I think this is the type of book where you have to EXPERIENCE everything and my own views may differ from others. Tuva] is admirably resilient, full of warmth and humour… Her travails may well give sensitive readers nightmares, but that’s a small price to pay for spending time in her exhilarating company.’ The novel features Tuva Moodyson, a journalist, previously working for the Guardian in London, now living in Gavrik (a fictional town near Gothenburg) and working on the small local newspaper. She made the move to be close to her mother who is spending her last days in a nursing home nearby.

I will absolutely never be tired of the Tuva Moodyson series, and I LOVED this newest installment of the series.Further Tuva has additional complexities to her character: her fear of the wild; the loss of her father and the longer lasting repercussions of that, including the impact it has on her victim’s family-sensitive approach to journalism; her ever present guilt over the conflict between her career ambitions and her need to look after her mother – which lead her to uneasy short and long term compromises (including her very move to a small Swedish town) which fail to satisfy either requirement – and some quirks (mainly wine gums and gaming). It didn’t feel brave at the time. It would have felt more brave staying in London, to be honest,” he says. “Being on the tube at 6am every day, we just didn’t want that any more. And I craved more time to read and write, and to take that seriously. I never thought I would be a writer and never imagined it until I was in my mid-30s.” Firstly it avoided the need for translation - so not distracting the prolific but still clear overly in demand Wymondham based Don Bartlett from completing the translation of Knausgaard's My Struggle into English.

Bad Apples is a chilling outing for Tuva Moodyson – unsettling from beginning to the very end, but leavened with dark humour. A compelling thriller that devoted fans and new readers will adore.’Tuva has had her fair share of tragedy and is still reeling from the incident that almost killed her lover and put her in a coma. She now feels like she has little to lose, which is perhaps the reason she throws herself headlong into trying to solve another mystery, consequences be damned. A young woman has gone missing up near the mysterious Rose Farm, and no one is talking. It’s the sort of challenge Tuva cannot resist, even if it puts herself in danger. Tuva is trying to write a report on a missing person, and as part of this report she needs to interview a group of survivalists who are doing all they can to live off grid and prepare for the bad times ahead. In trying to investigate Tuva needs to ingratiate herself into the group, and try and get them to open up to her. The more she does this, the more that is revealed about the group until we reach an epic conclusion. No pattern of clues or slow revealing of mystery. This is how most crime authors would meet a word count. There'd be clues that uncovered more mystery but also more clues. There'd be things we're all trying to work out. There'd be questions which seemed like they were answered but then turned out not to be. But oh no, there's no time for that here because we have descriptions of Thai food filling our protgraginist's belly as well as descriptions of some of the racist customers who frequent the Thai food place, because you know... everyone in Sweden is racist. Dean is not deaf himself, and doesn’t understand why Tuva, who has now appeared in three crime novels, with more to follow, came to him in that way. “I wish I understood these things better. Maybe it’s a subconscious thing, and I had gleaned that I hadn’t seen many deaf characters,” he says. He still researches extensively into life with hearing loss, and says he was “worried and concerned” about how deaf readers would receive Tuva. When a deaf reader tells him his writing feels authentic, it means everything to him.

Swedish reporter Tuva Moodyson, who wears hearing aids, takes to the hills where the isolated and inbred town of Visberg can be found at the end of a long and winding road.’ Tuva is an astute journalist, dedicated to the Gavrik Posten. She gains unique access to the residents and of course soon finds herself in danger as she tries to expose the truth and identify the culprit with the sometimes reluctant help of the local police. Tuva is a deaf young woman, who has returned to a remote part of Sweden to be nearer to her dying mother. Working for the local paper, she's suddenly pulled into a full-blown murder case as 'Medusa' (a killer with a penchant for removing people's eyes) re-emerges.

Similarly although I enjoyed both the main character and a number of the side characters, I would prefer if the author moved on to something different and allowed the future of characters to remain in my imagination – but inevitably within the genre this is likely to be the first in a series of appearances by Tuva who will presumably stumble across other small town murders in future. The plot and mystery is okay, not fantastic and again nothing compared to the wonderfully creepy eyeless corpses of the first book. It seems the murders have started again with the discovery of the mutilated body of a hunter in the forest. THE AUTHOR: Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. He was a bookish, daydreaming kid who found comfort in stories and nature (and he still does). After studying Law at the LSE, and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden. He built a wooden house in a boggy clearing at the centre of a vast elk forest, and it's from this base that he compulsively reads and writes. Having grown up in the East Midlands, Dean depicts the huge skies and endless flats of the region through the eyes of Thanh Dao, to whom it is a “flatland hell”. “I do love it. I find it quite eerie and bleak, but it is quite beautiful,” he says. “I like bad weather and bleak landscapes. Where I am in the forest, the sun won’t rise above the treetops for the next two or three months. My friends freak out, and think that sounds awful, but I quite like it.”