Bad Intentions - Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions (2010) is the eighth in Fossum's Inspector Sejer series.  I had previously read the seventh, The Water's Edge (2009) and the standalone novel Broken (2008), both of which I rated highly.  Indeed, Fossum was my personal discovery of the year 2010.  Why is she not featured on this blog as often as other purveyors of Nordic noir?  Because she is seriously badly published in the UK by vintage.  The covers are uninspiring (I mean, just look at it) and they seem to do almost zero marketing.  You never find them in major national bookstores and happening on one in your local library, as I have done for all three aforementioned, is pure fluke.

Fossum, who is Norwegian, writes psychological crime in the manner of Ruth Rendell.  She eschews serial killers and conspiracy.  In this novel we are not sure if there has been a crime at all.  If there has been, we know for sure whodunit, but not exactly what has been done or why.  There is no gore, no startling twists, and yet Fossum holds our attention from the first sentence to the last.  She is a major writer and deserves to be better known.  I mean, the least Vintage could do is give her an English-language website.

Unknown - Mari Jungstedt

Mari Jungstedt is a Swedish writer who sets her murders on the island of Gotland.  This is, I believe, the third novel featuring dull copper Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas and unambitious TV reporter Johan Berg.  The others are called Unseen and Unspoken, but this appears to be a silly affectation on the part of her English-language publishers - as near as I can tell, the Swedish title of Unknown is something like Inner Circle, which at least has the merit of relevance.

Anyway, this is a tale of ritual murder and archaeology, which on the face of it sounds promising.  Unfortunately it isn't.  Two protagonists means Jungstedt covers all bases with no real effort in terms of plotting or deductive reasoning - if she needs to tell us something Knutas can't know, she simply switches to Berg.  The other problem is that both need to be rounded characters and thus have private lives which are not interesting enough to warrant the space devoted to them.  That said, the stuff with Johan and his new baby is decently done - but the mother of the child is just annoying.

The characters I would have liked to know more about are both spikey women - Knutas's deputy, DI Karin Jacobsson and Berg's punkish camerawoman Pia.  But they remained cyphers, Pia a tool for improbable plot elements.

The book is not without merits.  The local colour of Gotland is well done and there is quite a lot of skill in the way Jungstedt builds the tension in the final showdown.  Overall, though, not for me.  Nordic, certainly, but nowhere near noir enough.