Aud Torvingen (3)

From cult phenomenon to award-winning literary sensation, “the sexiest action figure since James Bond” () returns in an exhilarating new thriller.

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 Torvingen teaches the students in her self-defense class. But the question is whether Aud really believes this lesson herself-and if not, what it will take for her to learn it.

Aud has trained herself to achieve a fierce, machine-like precision, in hand-to-hand combat as well as life. But in Always she is abruptly confronted with the limits of her own power. Her self-defense classes spin violently out of her grasp and, still reeling from the consequences, she embarks on a seemingly simple investigation of Seattle real estate fraud that pulls her into something far more complicated and dangerous than she had imagined.

Aud (it rhymes with “shroud”) Torvingen is six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes. She can restore a log cabin with antique tools or put a man in a coma with her bare hands. As imagined by Nicola Griffith in this ferocious masterpiece of literary noir, Aud is a hero who combines the tortured complexity with moral authority.

In the aftermath of her lover’s murder, the last thing a grieving Aud wants is another case. Against her better judgment she agrees to track down an old friend’s runaway fiancée—and finds herself up against both a sociopath so artful that the law can’t touch him, and the terrible specters of loss and guilt. As stylish as this year’s Prada and as arresting as a razor at the throat, places Nicola Griffith in the first rank of new-wave crime writers.

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 , and moves on—when behind her house explodes, incinerating its sole occupant, a renowned art historian. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone.