Ice Town by Will Dean

If you’re a regular visitor to Linda’s Book Bag you’ll already know how much I love Will Dean’s writing; both his standalone books and his Tuva Moodyson series. Consequently, although I’m taking on very few blog tours at the moment whilst I find life a bit of a challenge, I simply could not resist being part of the launch celebrations for Will’s latest book, Ice Town. Having been coveting Ice Town since hearing about it in Harrogate earlier this year, my huge thanks go to Alainna Hadjigeorgiou for inviting me to take part in this blog tour and for sending me a copy of Ice Town in return for an honest review.

You’ll find my reviews of many of Will’s books here.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton on 7th November 2024, Ice Town is available for purchase through the publisher links here.

Ice Town

ONE WAY IN. NO WAY OUT.

‘Deaf teenager goes missing in Esseberg. Mountain rescue are launching a search party but conditions hinder their efforts. The tunnel is being kept open all night as an exception.’

When journalist Tuva Moodyson reads this news alert she knows she must join the search. If this teenager is found, she will be able to communicate with him in a way no one else can.

Esseberg lies on the other side of a mountain tunnel: there is only one way in and one way out. When the tunnel closes at night, the residents are left to fend for themselves. And as more people go missing, it becomes clear that there is a killer among them …

Ice Town is an unputdownable new standalone Tuva novel, which will delight existing fans of the series and bring many new readers to it.

My Review of Ice Town

Tuva Moodyson is heading north to investigate a missing deaf teenager.

Ice Town is a breath-taking thriller that twists and turns with revelations that stop the reader in their tracks. That in itself makes this an outstanding narrative and a gripping read. The murders and mystery completely engage the reader in a spellbinding story and it’s impossible to predict just what might happen next. And yet that wasn’t the greatest success of the book for me. What I found so captivating, so affecting and, ultimately, so moving was the way in which Will Dean explores the sense of other and how he delves below what Joseph Conrad might call the thin veneer of civilisation. He illustrates to perfection the way we judge, the way we make assumptions and how we choose to ignore the evils of the world that hide in plain sight. This is intelligent, sophisticated writing underpinning a fantastic tale.

In Ice Town Will Dean manages that perfect balance between sparse, almost brutal prose that slices like a knife, and beautiful description that places the reader right alongside Tuva in Esseberg. The variety of sentence is completely compelling and creates tension and atmosphere so effectively that I had to keep stopping as I read to give myself time to recover from the text, not least because Tuva’s first person voice makes the narrative so intimate. As Tuva uncovers layers of the investigation, so the author reveals a little more about her with the effect that she becomes even more vivid and convincing. It doesn’t matter how many of the previous Tuva Moodyson novels readers have read because woven into Ice Town are sufficient details to give the requisite essence of Tuva’s backstory, but equally, the reader can simply enjoy this book as a standalone. Tuva is a magnificent creation. 

Ice Town itself, or Esseberg, is every bit as much a character as a setting. There’s a claustrophobic sense of threat and isolation. Brooding mountains, a constricting tunnel and a population that feels enclosed and uneasy, create such a sense of menace that I found an almost unbearable intensity in the area. Reading Ice Town made me glad to be in rural, flat, fenland Lincolnshire!

One of the elements I loved so much was, whilst Tuva is investigating and building her story through layers and snippets of information, so Will Dean threads his narrative with sensitive social issues such as his sympathetic depiction of Peter’s Grandmother Mrs Wikstrom. Through her he gives status and gravitas to older people. Indeed, I found the characters truly realistic and vivid. Tuva is, of course, at the centre of the action and this story adds greater detail to who she is, but each person depicted here feels like someone who could live next door to the reader. The effect is to make Ice Town even more unsettling, making the reader question what might be happening in their own environment. The isolated, the dispossessed and the different are presented in Ice Town with complete understanding of human nature, making for an affecting as well as entertaining story.

It’s quite difficult to say too much about the plot of Ice Town without spoilers, but it is fast paced, surprising, compelling and gripping. I’d even go so far as to say that all a reader needs to do is to think of any positive adjective to describe a thriller and Ice Town will embody it.

As an enormous fan of Will Dean’s writing and of his Tuva Moodyson character, I had high expectations of Ice Town. Perhaps they were unrealistic expectations. However, Ice Town surpassed them all. I thought it was quite, quite brilliant and I loved it. It’s one of my favourite reads this year!

About Will Dean

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands and had lived in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying Law at the LSE and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden where he built a 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. His debut novel in the Tuva Moodyson series, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s Book Club, shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize and named a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Red Snow was published in January 2019 and won Best Independent Voice at the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, 2019. Black River was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Award in 2021. Will also writes standalone thrillers: The Last Thing to Burn, First Born, the top twenty hardback bestseller The Last Passenger and The Chamber.

For further information, find Will on Twitter/X @willrdean, Instagram and on Facebook.

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