The Eternal Flame of Alchemy (2011)

I remember it as if it was yesterday. I visited my uncle's shack on July 20th, 1969. It was a beautiful, fresh nighttime as we played a game of give and take with a small group of people. I was occasionally looking at the stars as my eyes followed the most beautiful princess on this earth that I ever saw. My uncle was an alchemist, an experienced glass blower who claimed to have found out the recipe on how to create gold. Others with their own dark secrets gathered around and practiced glass blowing under him. They all wanted to be the best, or so I assumed, but not me. I visited him for another reason. As time passed, we turned into a group of people that regularly gathered at my uncle's place. It was our own little cult. Ours, and hers. Angelika's... I still see her in my dreams. She was the girlfriend of my uncle, over decade younger than him. And I slept with her on that faithful day when I was a lad who didn't understand anything about the world. But it wasn't just me, but everyone else who were there as well. And my uncle knew about it....
The radio was on as Apollo 11 reached its destination. Neil Armstrong took his first step on that massive satellite which circles around this world. It was that little game we played which foreshadowed the day when Angelika would go missing.   
- My interpretation on how Thomas Hartman saw his past in The Eternal Flame of Alchemy


For over half a year I haven't really read through a single full novel, but every now and then I've spent some time reading a page or two of The Eternal Flame of Alchemy (Alkemins Eviga Eld, 2011) by Swedish crime fiction writer Anna Jansson. Just couple of days ago I was halfway in this book that I've spent like a year trying to get through, but as the sunny days were fantastic enough for me to stay in the park up til' late evening, I decided to grind through. This is the 12th story in the detective inspector Maria Wern book series.

The Eternal Flame of Alchemy's prologue first takes us back to those days when a glass blower by the name of Justus Hartman and his apprentices were together with him and his young nephew Thomas Hartman. Justus's girlfriend Angelika is the key element tying everything in this story. One day, Angelika goes missing, and then winds up back at Justus's place but soon after she dies. Story then moves decades forward to a time when Thomas Hartman, the boss of our main character inspector Maria Wern, learns that his uncle Justus had gone missing from a hospital. Justus had lost both of his legs in an accident some decades ago and was moving on a wheelchair. But even that was left behind in the hospital.

As Thomas Hartman and Maria Wern do basic police officer work in Gotland while trying to find the whereabouts of Thomas's missing uncle, they wind up to a situation where a corpse is found inside a glass box in a pool of water inside a hotel. Thomas sees this glass box and realizes that it contains one of the apprentices of Justus Hartman from decades ago. Thomas gets a heart attack from this sudden realization and is taken to a hospital, which is when rest of the story shifts focus to following Maria Wern as the lead character. Soon after the first murder Maria gets to see other bodies pop up everywhere in different way, hanged on a large steel gate with the corpse's hands up as if it was flying, or get to witness a man get shot right before reaching the finish line as the first in goal, in a horse race. It's a serial murder case that they've got on their hands now. And all of these victims were connected to Justus Hartman. At the same time as the bodies start to wind up, rumours start spreading about a woman who is identical to the deceased Angelika walking around the place, asking about these victims.
 
 Near the end of this story Maria quite randomly learns that the murders follow a certain pattern, taken from one of the basic ideas of alchemy. Has Angelika been resurrected and is the culprit trying to create something? The reader also gets to follow the aged and legless Justus Hartman as he wakes up in a cage where he's been stuffed into by the culprit of the story. He's kept in the cage for the entire duration of the story and is forced to follow the deaths of his old apprentices. But why?


This is the first book from Anna Jansson that I've read, and it started pretty well. The story felt well enough crafted and even had a bit of this intriguing classic atmosphere to it as a group of people gathered around to talk about supernatural stuff relating to alchemy in the late 1960's. But as the story soon jumped to the present time of 2000's, some of the atmosphere was quickly lost. Regardless, the story kept my interest for the first 100 or so pages as we got introduced to the story and its characters, but after that it became really hard to keep reading which was why I haven't talked about novels in a while. It was a snoozefest with plotlines that didn't feel relevant or were simply uninteresting. The main story itself was handled very mediocrily and by the time the end of the book hit, I was appalled. There were concepts in this story that had interesting premises, but none of those were handled properly. Even though we get to follow Justus Hartman while he's caged up, those chapter have clearly been written in to fill the pages. Justus's presence in the hands of the culprit were filler chapters that had no bearing on the plot or the story, and even in the end, what comes of Justus, is very disappointing as there was no proper substance to anything that is supposed to hit the reader.

There are couple of reasons why the ending is supposed to have tension or is even supposed to have couple of twists to it, but they're awful. The culprit's identity isn't a surprise in the slightest and the build-up and realization to it are very poorly crafted and a bit random. It's not something that the reader can logically pinpoint, but it is obvious. I can't believe the author thought that those would be something of a plot twists.
At the end there's supposed to be tension to the story as well, but it all just feels random, as if the author just went "well, let's just end this" and quickly created couple of chapters to end the story in a way where it could have ended 100 or 200 pages ago. The reason for this feeling I get is the lack of substance and inserted filler-chapters that I mentioned before. I'm very disappointed in how some of these characters ended up in, and in general the whole story clearly didn't really move any of our main cast of characters in this particular Gotland's Police Department anywhere as characters.

As this is the 12th installment in this Maria Wern book series, I kind of expected much better storytelling. The first half did show hints of professionalism, but the second was a complete flop in so many ways. The characters were uninteresting as hell and their stories were terrible. The story has a lot of focus on the officers in the same department as Maria Wern, and there're cringeworthy plotlines regarding love and relationships with them that also lead nowhere. The way how the main story is presented is really bland. I've read another review about this story praising the false leads and the way the culprit was hidden until the end, but those praises ring very hollow to me. That same review I read also brings up some obvious flaws in this story's plot: how in the world did the culprit do everything in public spots so that no one saw anything? That's ridiculous. Literally hundreds of people should have seen the culprit in act. Furthermore, there is no human strong enough to just pull adult males however many meters up a large steel gate or move a massive glass box and an adult male in it...let alone this culprit. The more I think about this story, the less sense it makes in many ways. Illogical and cheap.

 I still have one more book left from this author that I might be willing to check just to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I'm definitely not enthusiastic about reading another work that's potentially similar to this one.