The Blue Place

The Blue Place
by Nicola Griffith

The Blue Place
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Book Summary Information

Author: Nicola Griffith
Edition: Paperback
Published: 1999-06-01
ISBN: 0380790882
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial

Book Reviews of The Blue Place

Book Review: Good story with a complex main character
Summary: 4 Stars

Well-told whodunit involving this very troubled and complex main character and her very defensive--almost paranoid sometimes--approach to life and people. I must admit that I read the sequel, Stay, before I read this book, and in The Blue Place I get a little bit more insight into Aud's character, but still there is no clue as to childhood trauma or other influence described from her past that I can find that helps me even begin to understand Aud's constant need to defend herself and approach life in the way she does. It's a bit much for me just to accept the character as she is and not wonder where her thinking comes from.

Otherwise, despite the author's painstaking focus on detail, sometimes she spends too much time on side issues, like going into the minutia of glacier formation and telling a troll story or two, which really, though interesting, are tangential to the main story itself.

Summary of The Blue Place

Science fiction writer Nicola Griffith, winner of the Nebula and Tiptree Awards, proves that good writing transcends genre. The Blue Place is a spare, cold suspense thriller--Norwegian noir--with the kind of strong, enigmatic characters that made Griffith's Slow River such a great read. Aud Torvingen is a former cop, martial artist, and Scandinavian to the core. She stalks powerfully through the streets of Atlanta and the fjords of Norway in search of an art thief and killer. At first, she frightens us a bit, because she insistently imagines how easy it would be to kill almost everyone she meets. Having descended more than once into that dark, cold psychic realm wherein violence provides primal pleasure, Aud is constantly wary of her fellow human beings. But our fear turns to fascination as she finds herself falling in love with Julia, a smart, beautiful art dealer mixed up in the crime, and getting closer to finding the center of the danger in the icy north.

As in Slow River and Ammonite, Griffith's attention is often on the bodies of her characters--their awareness of skin and muscle, sinew and bone suffuses the action. Griffith closely scrutinizes their deeper inner workings, their emotions and logic, as well. The story is tense and gripping, as a good thriller should be, but the best part of The Blue Place is Aud's fascinatingly familiar search for self. --Therese Littleton


A police lieutenant with the elite "Red Dogs" until she retired at twenty-nine , Aud Torvigen is a rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and a tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway into the failed marriage between a Scandinavian diplomat and an American businessman, she now makes Atlanta her home, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South. She glides easily between the world of silken elegance and that of sleaze and sudden savagery, equally at home in both; functional, deadly, and temporarily quiescent, like a folded razor.

On a humid April evening between storms, out walking just to stay sharp, she turns a corner and collides with a running woman, Catching the scent of clean, rain-soaked hair, Aud nods and silently tells the stranger Today, you are lucky, and moves on—when behind her house explodes, incinerating its sole occupant, a renowned art historian. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone.

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