Nicola Griffith

Aud Torvingen is a rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and the tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway, a land of ice and snow, she now lives in Atlanta, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South, gliding easily between the worlds of the elegant elite and the criminal underbelly: beautiful and functional as a folded razor. On an April evening between thunderstorms, Aud turns a corner and collides with a running woman. She catches the scent of clean, rain-wet hair, thinks Today, you are lucky, and moves on—and behind her the house explodes in a tiger-lily of flames. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone. But the woman, Julia, returns, seeking Aud's protection in a deadly international game of art forgery, drugs, money laundering and murder. But Aud knows danger. When danger sits opposite and offers you the dice, you should walk away. Danger loads the dice, it cheats. But for Julia, Aud will play—and risk losing herself in that cool blue place where everything slows to crystal clarity and violence is bliss... Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place reshapes the noir suspense novel into something refreshing, and excitingly new.

Aud Torvingen has never worried about violence. To her it is simply a tool, one of many, to be used, as appropriate, with dispassion, speed, and precision. In Always, she takes on a new challenge: teaching a group of ordinary Atlanta women self-defense skills. It doesn't matter how well trained you are, how big, how fast, how strong; there will always be someone out there bigger or faster or stronger. Always. That's what Aud tells her students—but she never imagined the consequences of imparting that lesson, which shake her to the core. To regroup, she travels to Seattle to meet her Norwegian diplomat mother and her mother's new husband. She's also there to handle what looks to be a run-of-the-mill fraud at one of her investment properties, currently being used as a movie set. Big money is in play, and it seems someone is sabotaging the production. In intertwined Seattle and Atlanta narratives—seductive, and breathtakingly taut—Aud engages with the limits of self-reliance and faces the appalling—and appealing—prospect of allowing herself to need other people.

Raw with grief, Aud Torvingen wants nothing to do with the world. She is rebuilding a log cabin in the middle of the Appalachians, refusing the efforts of anyone who wants to reach her. Until Dornan, Aud's only real friend, asks her to track down his runaway fiancée, Tammy. Aud has no love for or faith in Tammy, but she feels obliged to help—and first on the streets of New York City, and then deep in the woods of Arkansas, she finds herself up against Karp, a sociopath so artful that the law can't touch him. Fortunately, Aud has no love for or faith in the law, either—she prefers other tools. But perhaps even more dangerous to Aud than Karp are Aud's own demons. As arresting as a razor at the throat, Nicola Griffith's Stay is a ferocious masterpiece of literary noir, a stunning juxtaposition of beauty and brutality. In its pages Griffith fuses Aud's steely moral authority with a new, ever-evolving emotional depth.