The Man in the Wall by Emma Angstrom @Bloodhoundbook #themaninthewall #emmaangstrom #bloodhoundbooks

Bloodhound Books 2017 Blog Tour

Book Synopsis

Alva is a sad and lonely child.  With her father locked up in prison, she moves with her mother and two older sisters to an apartment building in town.  She does not like her new home.  Her room is small and her sisters continue to exclude Alva from their games.

Soon a bizarre murder takes place in the building.  A husband discovers his wife dead in the hall of their apartment, two weeks after she disappeared from their home.

Where had the body been hidden for two weeks?  And how could the perpetrator get in and out of the apartment.

The Man in the Wall, accurately captures what this creepy book is about.  Lonely Alva, not really fitting in anywhere, missing her father and confused about where he is develops a preoccupation with the occult, her education gleaned from The Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena and fuelled by the knowledge of her late grandmother’s similar supernatural interests.  This is largely Alva’s story with the reader aware of ‘something’ in the walls, watching the many occupants of the apartment block where Alva lives.  The murder holds no secrets for the reader as they watch it unfold, but adds an air of menace to the book as the ‘man in the wall’ is clearly not just a benevolent presence.

I enjoyed this book a lot, it was an easy and engaging read with short chapters and a degree of tension throughout.  Touching on a range of themes including bullying, mental illness, crime and disability this story skilfully showed a number of sides which interestingly illicited my sympathy despite wrongs committed.  That said this was seriously sinister, helped along by a couple of true crime references of hidden passages aiding heinous crimes.  I found myself looking at my wardrobes slightly differently whilst wondering when will this great book be made into a film, because surely it must!

Author Bio

Emma Angstrom is an author and architect.  She has a Master’s degree in architecture from the Royal Technical University in Stockholm and from Parsons in New York.  Besides her writing she currently works as head of communications at an architectural firm in Stockholm, Sweden.

She was born in 1982 in Vasteras, Sweden, and started her writing career as a journalist at the age of 17.  Since then she has also worked as a lighting designer, and written non-fiction books about lighting design and architecture.

Angstrom made her debut in 2009 with the novel And All is Distorted (Oct allt at forvridet).  In 2016 The Man in the Wall was released, a remarkable and nerve-wracking thriller with a ‘monster’ it is hard not to feel certain sympathy with.  Condensed writing shaping characters of real flesh and blood, a steady hand’s brushwork forming each piece of the portrait’s originality to a whole, stylistically assured.

Thank you to Sarah Hardy and Bloodhound Books for arranging my participation in this Blog tour.