SACRIFICIAL SMOKE <i> by Jan Fridegard translated by Robert E. Bjork (University of Nebraska Press: $9.95) </i>

This volume completes Robert Bjork’s translation of Swedish novelist Jan Fridegard’s critically acclaimed “Holme” trilogy. “Sacrificial Smoke” focuses on the escalating conflict between Christianity and native Scandinavian paganism in 9th-Century Uppsala. As he seeks to free the thralls and limit the spread of Christianity in the small Viking kingdom, Holme represents a threat to both the established economic order and the nascent religious orthodoxy. The local chieftain and foreign missionaries plot his murder, but the dark, brooding smith is not an easy man to kill. “Sacrifical Smoke” recaptures the strength and tension that made the first book, “The Land of Wooden Gods,” so compelling--and was sadly lacking in the second, “People of the Dawn.”