Bestselling French author Olivier Truc will return to bookstores with a new work on September 4th 2026. Base Toundra (Tundra Airport) is a gripping historical standalone thriller of Arctic noir and wartime espionage and set on an old WWII isolated military airfield deep in the Swedish Lapland. As usual, the original French edition is being published by Éditions Métailié.
Base Toundra (Tundra Airport) combines military suspense, espionage, and Sámi culture in a powerful dual-timeline narrative. The discovery of a wartime notebook revealing the murder of a French pilot at the remote airfield becomes the catalyst for a gripping investigation that bridges past and present, and unravels Sweden’s wartime secrets. With its isolated Lapland setting, morally complex characters, and mounting tension, it confirms Olivier Truc as one of the great masters of French noir, this time with a historical twist.
About this abandoned airport and the idea behind this novel, the author said:
"The idea for this novel was born in the mid-1990s after a meeting in Kiruna, a mining town in Swedish Lapland, with a Swede who drove iron ore trains during the Second World War. At the time, it had just been revealed that a large part of this iron ore had been paid for by the Nazis with gold looted from occupied countries or taken from victims of the concentration camps. I had only recently arrived in Sweden and knew very little about the country’s history. This former railway worker told me, with a certain good humour, about the hardships and ambiguities of neutrality. He remembered that, during the war, a small airfield near Kiruna had at times hosted both a German aircraft and an Allied aircraft simultaneously. Over time, and with distance, the novelist I eventually became took over from the journalist part of me and transformed this fragment of history into fiction."
The novel starts in September 1939. Captain Stig Blumfors lands at a small, isolated military airfield deep in Swedish Lapland, carrying sealed orders: war has broken out, Sweden has declared its neutrality, and the airfield is to be cut off from the outside world. Thus begins a long and gruelling confinement, interrupted only by the arrival of lost or distressed British and German aircraft. As second-in-command of the airfield, he sees his mission as maintaining Sweden’s neutrality at all costs, a near-impossible task given the base commander’s pro-German sympathies. In this context, Blumfors begins to write a personal journal.
Fast forward to February 2023. As Sweden’s accession to NATO is being blocked by Turkey, Captain Guy Puech and his company of French paratroopers begin a month of Arctic warfare exercises at the former airfield, now transformed into a military training ground, under the command of Swedish Captain Maria-Pia Tedelius. When Maria-Pia takes Guy to visit her grandmother Mirjá, who may be able to satisfy his curiosity about the role of the Sámi during the war, she eventually entrusts him with the journal Blumfors kept during the conflict, telling him that it contains a startling revelation: a French pilot, Joseph Vivarès, was murdered at the airfield.
As Maria-Pia and Guy attempt to solve the mystery of Vivarès’s death, the revelations they discover along the way will alter both their understanding of history and their personal relationship.
Based in Stockholm since 1994, Olivier Truc is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed French writer, journalist, TV documentary director and producer, and scriptwriter. He was previously the Nordic and Baltic regional correspondent for French broadsheet Le Monde and has produced, amongst other projects, a 52-minute-long documentary about China in the Arctic.
Olivier has also written graphic novels, short stories and non-fiction books, including L’Imposteur (2006, Calmann-Lévy), Dykaren som exploderade (2008, Norstedts), and L’affaire Nobel (2019, Grasset) based on personal stories, in-depth portraits and interviews.
In addition to the five bestselling crime novels in the Reindeer Police series, he has published a historical novel, The Cartographer of the Boreal Indies (2019, Métailié), The Dark Paths of Karachi (2022, Métailié), a thriller set between Pakistan and France, and L'inconnue du port (2023, Points/Alfaguara), written together with Spanish co-author Rosa Montero. A Spanish-language Netflix film adapting L'inconnue du port will premiere in June 2026.
For more information about the above title, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna[at]pontas-agency.com).