The Glitter Scene

Fagerholm's dense thriller demands second reading%E2%80%94if only to fill in the holes and put together the scattered pieces of her puzzle. In 2004, sensitive teenage Johanna lives with her aunt Solveig in a marshy seaside Finnish town still marked by the tragic events of Fagerholm's previous novel, The American Girl (a visiting girl's suspicious death, one lover's suicide, another's disillusionment). After Johanna digs into her family's connection to the tragedy, she learns the complicated history that led to the event, and the novel dips 15 years back to find Susette Packl%C3%A9n and Maj-Gun Maalamaa, two girls brought together by loss. They have a fraught friendship and a temporal connection to the American girl's death; this section (coyly subtitled "An entirely different story, or maybe not?") tracks the dangerous ripples that reverberate from acts of terror and love. Finally, Fagerholm returns to the original crime (and others) with an epilogue that provides some (not all) of the answers readers have been waiting for. These haunted characters reveal the effects of a tragedy on a small community. While the opaque stream-of-consciousness prose and bleak Scandinavian imagery can create inertia, the conclusion of The American Girl narrative will delight fans of the series. (Aug.)