Death Deserved - Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger

 This seems to be the first of the Blix/Ramm series.   In other words, I have read the first three in the wrong order.   No matter.   They work perfectly well as standalone novels.

We start in 1999, with the incident that changed everything for Blix, his partner-now-boss Gard Fosse, and Emma Ramm.   Then, almost twenty years later, Blix is given a missing person enquiry.   Well know Nordic athlete Sonja Nordstrom, whose tell-all memoir is to be published today, has failed to show up to the various launch events.   Has she just taken herself off - or has she been kidnapped.

Eventually they find a body on a boat owned by Sonja.   It's not her.   Someone is playing with the police and killing second rate celebs in a warped countdown order.   Meanwhile Blix's daughter Iselin is appearing on Norway's big reality show, Worthy Winner.   Could she possibly be in any danger?  (Anyone who's read anything by Horst knows the answer to that one.)   Emma, as a celebrity news blogger, is obviously drawn in.   It's fascinating how the authors handle the realisation about the role Blix played in her life.   They do it really well.

It's a cracking book with a couple of really cunning twists at the end.   I didn't guess who the villain was, yet the answer was entirely credible.   No wonder the Blix/Ramm series has now extended to five.   I'm definitely on the lookout for Stigma and Victim.

Hellfire - Karin Fossum

 

It's been a while since my last Fossum.  This instalment in her Sejer series dates from 2014 but is set ten years earlier.  Two one-parent families prepare for Christmas.  Bonnie and Simon, a care worker and her young son; and Mass and Eddie, a middleaged woman and her twenty-one year-old with mild learning difficulties.  The following summer, an horrific double murder is discovered in an abandoned caravan.  Sejer and Skarre investigate.

Fossum is very much the Ruth Rendell of Nordic Noir.  Her characters' psyches are explored in detail while the Confucian cop goes quietly about his business.  Like Rendell, Fossum never fails to draw me in, whatever her subject matter.  Hellfire is one of her best.

Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy - Jens Amundsen

 

A bit of a curiosity, this: a Norwegian police procedural written, under a pseudonym, by a Norwegian attorney who has spent a lot of time in the US and who has based this story, his first novel, on a real life US case, as yet unsolved.

The missing schoolboy is Karl Haugen, who has disappeared after a pre-school science fair.  He has been missing for a year and his parents are rich, so Commissioner Thorsen calls in his old rival, Harald Sohlberg, on permanent secondment to Interpol and based in America, to review the case and, ideally, find the killer.  He can have all the resources he wants, but all he wants is one assistant.  He gets Constable Wangelin, an ambitious young woman, eager to learn from the master.

The story is good.  Amundsen is interested in the psychology of crime and Sohlberg uses emotional intellect to reveal the killer.  It is all very clean and convincing.  The literary style is, however, horrible.  Instead of explaining the Norwegian terms, habits and lifestyle in authorial voice, or leaving us to find out for ourselves, Amundsen inserts it in dialogue - people who already know, explaining stuff to other people who already know.  I couldn't force myself to overlook this, or the ghastly cover art.  I liked it, but I that's about all I can say.

Blood on Snow - Jo Nesbo

Given that Midnight Sun is billed as Blood On Snow 2, it comes as no suprise that Blood On Snow itself is the precursor of Midnight Sun - the reason Olav runs away to the deep north. The set up is ingenious, worthy of James M Cain. Olav, whose only talent is as a fixer, is ordered by his gangster boss to kill the boss's much younger wife. Olav, of course, falls for the wife, which means doing a deal with his boss's rival, the Fisherman (who ultimately pursues him to the deep north in Part 2). The twists are obvious in hindsight, but Nesbo's great gift is the ability to slide them past you, unnoticed, as you read. Olav is a much more interesting character here than in Midnight Sun - a psychopath whose heart is in the right place. It sounds bizarre but it works.

Again, a very slim volume in which irrelevant detail is pared to the bone.  I liked it better than Midnight Sun. It is not a patch on Headhunters and inferior to perhaps half the Harry Hole Oslo series.

When the Devil Holds the Candle - Karin Fossum

I won't waste space by restating my conviction that Karin Fossum is by far the best writer in Nordic Noir. What I will say is that When the Devil Holds the Candle is easily the best Fossum I have read thus far.

First off, Inspector Sejer enters the fray much earlier, and he has the assistance of Jacob Skarre, his regular protege. Indeed, Skarre makes a brief appearance on page 1. The crime itself is complex; there are several of them and we are never sure until the very end how they are linked, if at all.  Essentially two young lads, Andreas and Zipp have too much time on their hands. They get into minor scrapes until a handbag snatch goes wrong and Andreas reveals an uncomfortable truth about himself to Zipp. In order to regain lost ground he takes on a home invasion.  After that, no one hears from him again.

To reveal more of the plot would risk giving away some of the twists and turns. What sets Fossum apart, when she's on form such as this, is her exploration of her characters, whether good or bad.  Of course, in truth, no one is wholly good or wholly bad. Andreas and Zipp both love their mothers. Sejer is dating again after a long time alone and wonders if he has waited too long. Irma Funder, who keeps cropping up throughout the novel, is older than Sejer, lonelier, and equally stubborn. I bet Karin regrets calling her elderly now that she herself has turned sixty.

Felicity David's translation from the original Norwegian reads very well. The cover is not as bad as other Vintage Fossum covers, though scarcely a design masterpiece, and it does for once reflect the story.

When the Devil Holds the Candle is therefore HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. If you're trying Fossum for the first time, start here or The Water's Edge.

Other novels by Karin Fossum discussed on this blog:

THE MURDER OF HARRIET KROHN
THE CALLER
BAD INTENTIONS
IN THE DARKNESS

The Murder of Harriet Krohn - Karin Fossum

There is a trope in Scandinavian noir in which the protagonist appears rarely.  The later works of Hakan Nesser are almost entirely devoid of Inspector Van Veeteren.  Indridason also manages most of his translated Inspector Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli series with very little Erlendur and no Oli whatsoever.

This, it seemed, was going to be the case with The Murder of Harriet Krohn.  Her series investigator, Inspector Konrad Sejer, doesn't appear in person (he is mentioned in the press early on) until page 187.  He then disappears again for a couple of chapters.  I thought that was it.  But I was wrong.  Fossum is by some distance the finest writer of all the Scandi noir lead players, a Norwegian Barbara Vine if you will.  Her interest is the evil that good men do, not simply the restoration of balance through justice.  Here, her interest is the wretched Charlo, who kills to try and break out of the wretched spiral of his life.  He knows perfectly well that he has done wrong.  He is fully conscious that he has a moral debt to pay.  He tries to put his life back together, to become again the good person he once was.  He re-establishes contact with his estranged teenage daughter.  He finds an interest they can share and love together.  He takes on menial labouring work to try and exorcise his guilt.  He even visits the grave of his victim, not to gloat or weep but to try and understand what happened between them.

Fossum goes to great lengths to make us empathise with Charlo, even giving him a crippling disease.  Thus when Sejer finally gets into his stride and questions Charlo our sympathies are equally divided between two fundamentally good men.  This sequence, lasting thirty pages or so, is a magnificent piece of writing, an object lesson on how these things should be done.  There is no trickery, no slight of hand, just diligent, effective questioning from Sejer and Charlo calculating how close he can stick to the truth without confronting the ultimate truth of what he has done.

I was reminded of Crime and Punishment - so strong were the resonances, I cannot believe Fossum did not seed the prompts deliberately.

I've said it before, but I wish she was better published.  Vintage is a great publisher, I look out for Vintage publications - so why is this cover, like all Fossum covers, so feeble?  And why that pathetic font?  Surely the way the author's name is done would sit more comfortably on a children's book.

Scarred - Thomas Enger

Scarred is the third Henning Juul story and Enger has unfortunately slipped into the trap facing all series writers.  It's not a Henning Juul mystery at all: Henning does virtually none of the crime solving and can't get directly involved in the scandal element because the subject of the scandal is his own sister.  More daring writers would have their hero break the rules, but Enger doesn't.  When it comes to the culmination of the main crime story Juul is ordered from the scene by his friend Inspector Bjarne Brogeland and meekly goes.  Worse, even we are denied the moment when the door is broken down and the armed response unit flood in.

Theoretically, I suppose we are supposed to be kept interested in Juul by his spasmodic quest to find out who torched his flat back in the first novel.  Perhaps readers who have followed the series from the beginning are interested.  Personally, there isn't enough here to get me interested.  Juul isn't developed enough to evoke empathy.

Check out the red 'sticker' on the cover.  It's a telling and fatal admission.  Not for fans of The Killing  or aficionados of Jo Nesbo, but for followers of Borgen, a series about a female politician who keeps risking her career over her frailties as a woman.  It's a fair enough parallel.  The murders start well but get dull very quickly, and it's actually a novel about Trine Juul-Osmundsen, not her brother.

On a positive note, I really enjoyed the use of the present tense and short chapters.  If you are determined to divide your narrative between three protagonists, short, punchy chapters is the way to go.

Cockroaches - Jo Nesbo

The second Harry Hole thriller, originally published in 1998 but only translated into English last year.  At last the UK publishing strategy becomes clear.  They published Nesbo to cash in on Nordic Noir, following the huge success of Henning Mankell, but there was a problem with the Hole series - the first two, Cockroaches and the sub-standard Bat, are set in the very un-Scandinavian Thailand and Australia respectively.  So they started with the Oslo-set Redbreast and stuck to the sequence until Nesbo was established as the most popular of all the Nordic crime writers.

Cockroaches is much better than the disappointing Bat.  Nesbo really gets into his stride with the second outing for Harry.  A Norwegian diplomat has been murdered in a seedy motel outside Bangkok.  There are rumours of paedophilia.  Send in Harry Hole, ostensibly because he made his name with the Australian case but really because---  As always with Nesbo's intricately crafted plots, it's easy to give too much away.

The characters are brilliant - the American female inspector of Thai police with alopecia, the ageing black ops agent, the financial whizz kid and the budding paralympian diver who flirts outrageously with Harry.

Forget episode one - this a series best started with episode two.

The Caller - Karin Fossum

 

 

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until everyone agrees - Karin Fossum is by far the most accomplished of the Nordic noir writers.  Jo Nesbo himself praises her, and he's no mug.  If only she were properly published and promoted in the UK, she'd be a fixture in the bestseller lists.

 

I adored this book, the ninth in the Inspector Sejer series.  It is redolent of Ruth Rendell in the way Fossum can bring horror to the humdrum and the psychological depth of her characterisation.  She doesn't do cyphers; even the most incidental of her characters has a life.  In this instance I particularly enjoyed the way she is content to leave one of the storylines unresolved.  Who did let the dogs out?

 

Like all Fossum's books, this is slim.  Every word has been weighed.  As close to perfection as makes no difference.  Essential reading for crime fiction fans everywhere.