71 posts tagged “"police procedural"”

Translated by Victoria Cribb.

HYPOTHERMIA is among the very best of the books I've read this year. It's the sixth of the author's Erlendur series to be translated into English; it is truly a mature, masterful and utterly fantastic book.

It's a story stripped bare to the bone. A young woman, Maria, commits suicide at her holiday cottage on the shores of Lake Thingvellier. About 30 years ago, Maria's father Magnus fell from his boat and drowned in the same lake. Ever since then, Maria has been extremely close to her mother, Leonora, still living with her even after graduating from university and her marriage to a doctor named Baldvin, who moved in with the two women after his wedding to Maria. Leonora died of cancer two years before the book opens, during which time Maria gave up her job to nurse her mother, constantly at her side. Everyone assumes that part of the reason for Maria's suicide was her inconsolable loss.

Erlendur is only involved in this case tangentially, in that he is told of Maria's death because Maria's main house is in his jurisdiction, so it falls to him to inform Baldvin of her death. Baldvin is devastated. A few days later, however, Maria's friend Karen, who discovered the body, comes to see Erlendur, convinced that Maria cannot have killed herself. Not only was Maria in a positive frame of mind, but Karen has a tape of a recent session between Maria and a medium, in which Maria talked of her comfort in being in touch with her mother from beyond the mother's grave - the two women had talked about this in the mother's final days, and agreed on a method of communication if there is "life after death".

Although Erlendur is sceptical, he is irresistibly drawn to situations involving the missing and the disappeared. He's already looking into three old cases of young people who have suddenly and inexplicably vanished, reflecting on the impact these events have had on the families of the departed. Family members tend to get in touch a on birthdays or anniversaries of the disappearances to find out if there is any news, and Erlendur sees how time takes its toll as the parents of these vanished teenagers become more infirm and eventually die. Erlendur largely lives in his own past, as his own life was shaped by a traumatic event when he was 10 years old. He and his younger brother (aged 8) were out on the hillside in a blizzard, and both boys became lost in the storm. Only Erlendur was found, nearly frozen to death.

Reflecting on these events, Erlendur visits the friends and relations of Maria, the dead young historian. He becomes more interested in the accident in which her father drowned, and digs out the details of the old police investigation, which seemed to have been carried out in a rather perfunctory fashion. At the same time, in a familiar theme in these books, he pursues new leads in the cold cases with characteristic focus.

The events of HYPOTHERMIA occur in a bubble removed from any official criminal investigation - although Erlendur interacts occasionally with his colleagues, the story focuses on his "private" investigation of Maria's death and the old disappearances. Although Erlendur does not believe in the afterlife, he's driven by his own inner need to speak for the lost and the missing, and perhaps above all to seek to thaw out some of the hypothermia of the souls of those who are left behind - including himself.

Erlendur's family life is also a fairly significant part of this book, as his own two children gradually switch roles with Erlendur and his long-ago divorced wife. Eva Lind (mainly) and Sindri want their parents to meet and to reconcile themselves to the break-up of their relationship, but it is quite clear that they are incapable of even the slightest understanding of each other's point of view. Perhaps because of Eva Lind's determination that her parents achieve some closure, or perhaps because of the investigations he's involved in, Erlendur reads to Eva Lind from a book describing the events in which he and his brother were lost, and he reflects on the impact the events, and the book's publication, had on his mother and on his own decisions at the time of his mother's death - directly relevant to Eva herself.

It is hard to convey the sadness and depth of HYPOTHERMIA. The book's plot is completely solid, being an apparently simple tale of a man going round talking to various people, but underneath there are so many layers of the past, of emotion and mood, of different ways of looking at death, disappearance and the lost, descriptions of the ways of life on this bleak island, and how past ways are changing.

There are no dramatics in this story, no exciting set-pieces or thrilling climaxes. The book is simply a rich, thoughtful, mature and compelling work, sympathetically translated. These Icelandic books have much in common with Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series, in particular the lonely perspectives of the protagonists Harry and Erlendur in speaking for the dead and disappeared of however many years ago - but each is a unique creation. I loved HYPOTHERMIA, with its ageless, deeply sad stories lying beneath its pages.

First published at Euro Crime, October 2009.

FEVER OF THE BONE is the sixth in the author's series about DCI Carol Jordan and criminal psychologist Tony Hill, but you don't need to have read the previous novels to appreciate this one. It is written with multi award-winning Val McDermid's usual professionalism, dependability, style and apparent effortlessness. Although some parts stray into formula and are even slightly tired, the book is replete with tiny, fascinating character sketches and barbs of insightful observations of modern mores that lift it way above the average. It's a perfect holiday or weekend piece of light reading (despite the dark central theme) that leaves plenty of issues to ponder after the last page is turned.

The main plot concerns the deaths of some young teenagers in and around the fictional town of Bradfield in northern England. Carol and her team find themselves looking for a person or people who stalked the youngsters by first befriending them on a social networking website called RigMarole, then luring them into a direct meeting, and then killing them. Very few details of the abductions and deaths are provided, thankfully, but it is harrowing to read about the impact of the disappearances on the children's parents, who seem to have done all they can to protect their offspring. While paying due respect to the emotions involved, the book shies away from covering much of these aspects and focuses mainly on the investigation: how Carol's "cold case" team discover clues via old-fashioned police work as well as by following the internet trail. One part of their multi-specialist approach is missing, however. Carol's new and unsympathetic boss, James Burke, will not let her call in Tony Hill to work on profiling the criminal, ostensibly for cost reasons but Carol senses egos are involved. Instead, Burke tells Carol to make do with one of the police force's own profilers, ironically a man trained by Tony. Of course the man is useless, leaving Carol and her colleagues pretty stuck as to how to proceed when the tangible leads run out.

Tony is not sitting around moping while all this is going on. At the end of the last book, he discovered that his estranged father had died, leaving him a considerable amount of money. Tony has no wish to learn anything about the life of the man who abandoned him as a baby, but he can't avoid sorting out his father's estate, having to sell his house and narrow boat in Worcester. By coincidence, Tony is contacted by the Worcester police who are at their wits' end over the killing of a young teenager and so hire Tony to create a criminal profile for them. Curious about his father's life despite himself, Tony agrees to take on the job and travels to Worcester, in the process ending up spending the night in his father's old house and beginning to discover unexpected things about his own past. (Helped without his knowledge and against his will by Carol, who confronts Vanessa, Tony's evil mother, to try to find some answers about the past lives of father and son.)

Carol and Tony are intensely involved with each other on an astral plane but can't admit their feelings openly (a longstanding theme). The action is stalled for a while because Carol is too principled to discuss details of her cases with Tony even though they live in the same house, because Tony is not officially involved. Eventually, they put their heads together and realise that the case Tony has profiled in Worcester is likely to be an earlier crime committed by the same person who killed the two teenagers in Bradfield. Tony is allowed back on the team and by joining forces with the attractively portrayed Alvin Ambrose of the Worcester police, Carol and her colleagues begin to narrow down their list of suspects. Val McDermid is bang up to the minute (or, rather, nanosecond) with her social media and technological know-how, providing a whistle-stop tour of security breaches and data-protection issues as the hunt becomes more targeted.

The criminal is eventually tracked down by a combination of traditional police detection and some (glossed-over) online gee-whizzery, with a dash of inspiration from Carol and Tony combined. Although the resolution is a logical and rational outcome of all the earlier clues, to me it did not seem credible in psychological terms, and nor did it seem likely that the criminal would have managed to obtain the specific information needed about which children to attack, despite the book's casual assumption that there is no security or code that cannot be hacked. For me, a stronger part of the book was the story of Tony's gradual discovery of his father, which is rather moving - and, one hopes, will enable him to move on a bit in his rather static relationship with Carol.

After reading this book, I learnt that Val McDermid and her publishers have created a social networking site called RigMarole, just as described in the book. In a spirit of curiosity I joined it, and have to admit it is an eerie experience to look around it and to see (and if you wish, interact with) the characters in the novel (some of whom meet sticky ends, and some of whom are distinctly unpleasant). I found this experience more unsettling than actually reading the book. If you want to look for yourself, the URL is http://rigmarole.ning.com/.

Review first published at Euro Crime, September 09.

The Darkest Room

Translator: Marlaine Delargy. THE DARKEST ROOM is a wonderful book, framed as the story of a wooden house, Eel Point, on the coast of the small island of Oland, Sweden - an island where the population is small and the old traditions continue. The house has a long, tragic history associated with the building of the two lighthouses on the nearby rocks, shipwrecks and various residents. The brief stories of these old tragedies are told in short sections interleaving the book's chapters, showing how Eel Point has become regarded today as haunted. The reader is never sure whether the ghosts are real, or to what extent the house's sad, cruel past is influencing current events.

A family moves to Eel Point, ostensibly to start a new life away from the city and the pressures of work and commuting, but as we gradually realise, there is another reason for the move. Katrine and Joakim have been married for seven years and are a typically smug, professional modern couple - good jobs, two lovely young children, well-off, and spending their spare time renovating their homes, which has enabled them to gradually move up the property ladder to the extent that they can now afford to buy the enormous yet run-down manor at Eel Point. At first it is hard to like either adult in this self-satisfied couple, but we gradually see the cracks in their personalities as, little by little, their story is revealed, and they become more sympathetic. Some of the revelations are from Katrine's estranged mother, Mirja Rambe, an artist of some renown and a determined Bohemian, for whom truth is an elastic concept. Mirja and her mother, an even more renowned artist, lived at Eel Point for a time during Mirja's childhood, and their secret history is central to the mysteries of the present.

Another plotline involves a series of robberies on the island. Three bored young men regularly get high on drugs before stealing from and vandalising holiday houses whose owners are absent in their regular jobs on the mainland. The police are completely unsuccessful in solving the case until Tilda Davidson, a new recruit arrives. Tilda is the connection between THE DARKEST ROOM and the first novel in this loose series, ECHOES FROM THE DEAD, as she is the granddaughter of old Gerlof Davidson's brother Ragnar. Tilda is both determined to make her mark as a policewoman subject to patronising sexism from her male colleagues (and smarting from an unfortunate affair), and also is interested in her own family history, of which she knows only fragments. Her grandfather Ragnar is dead, so she visits Gerlof in his old people's home to tape-record his reminiscences of his brother and their lives on the island. These sections of the book are among my favourites, both in Gerlof's reactions to the tape recording project and the way in which he infiltrates himself into Tilda's investigations. He immediately provides her with some good leads to the burglary case, as he knows old people who live near the properties concerned, people to whom a car passing down the road is a major life-event. Sure enough, Tilda and her colleagues soon begin to track down the perpetrators based on this evidence, and a case is gradually built up.

There are so many wonderful aspects to this book that it is impossible to note them all in a brief review. Above all, the author himself is a wonderful storyteller; one becomes totally immersed in his Oland world and in the lives and personalities of the superbly well-observed characters, major and minor. He is also a great plotter - the main stories as well as the minor ones weave in and out of each other: apparently small details in one story turn out to be highly relevant in another. He also has fun with the ghost-story concept, keeping the reader guessing as to whether he'll pull a supernatural solution out of the hat or whether he can possibly create a down-to-earth explanation for all the disparate events.

There is so much that could be said about this excellent novel, packed full of subtleties and stories, but my main advice is to read it and experience it for yourself. I wonder if, like me, you will be left thinking that there is more to the "solution" that the main protagonist, Joakim, realises? Does the author intend us to conclude that Joakim and Katrine have paid a price for a misdeed they themselves have done? I think so - for I believe that the couple has committed a terrible crime but are in total denial about it, and I believe that Johan Theorin wants us to see the novel as a story of acknowledgement and retribution.

A final note: I appreciated the translation by Marlaine Delargy: the collaboration between her and the author makes the book read as if it were written in the language in which I read it. THE DARKEST ROOM was a number one bestseller in Sweden and won the 2008 Glass Key award for the best Nordic crime novel of the year. If there is any justice in the world, the book will be winning many more awards now that it has been translated into English and so eligible for a greater number of them.

First published at Euro Crime, September 2009.

August Heat (Montalbano 10)

Translator: Stephen Sartarelli. If there is one thing that AUGUST HEAT, the tenth in the Inspector Montalbano series, does without a doubt, it is to make the reader feel the titular heat. The sweat and power of the sun is a constant presence, dominating the investigation and forming an oppressive, ubiquitous miasma: "Sitting on the veranda at Marinella, he thought he felt a hint of cool, but it was mostly a hypothesis of cool since neither the sea nor the air was moving."

Montalbano's girlfriend, Livia, is coming to stay for the summer season, but because of her extensive experience of being ignored by her paramour while he is called away on urgent police business, she commands him to find a holiday let for her friend Laura, together with Laura's husband Guido and their young, hyperactive son Bruno, so she will have things to do instead of being bored and alone. Montalbano attends to his task with his customary vigour, eventually lighting on an isolated but suitable villa by the sea, long abandoned by the German couple who own it as a result of various tragedies in their family. One senses that these tragedies were not entirely coincidental and are a harbinger of future complications, but more oblivious than the reader, Montalbano goes ahead and rents the villa on behalf of Livia's friends, who duly move in. Disaster constantly strikes, manifested by invasions of cockroaches, mice and then spiders - however, these are nothing compared with the terrifying disappearance of young Bruno and the family cat, together with a sinister discovery made by Montalbano while he searches for the lost boy.

Realising that the visitors' presence will needlessly complicate his investigations, Montalbano manipulates events so that they, including Livia, leave for home, clearing the way for him to interrogate a series of shady Sicilian builders, property speculators, and estate agents, uncovering all manner of dodgy practices. Despite the blistering heat, Montalbano and his regular band of assistants pursue their course with their usual zeal. Although I followed the plot with my usual enjoyment of Camilleri's novels, the typically offhand style is occasionally just too perfunctory. The central event took place some years ago, and most of the action once Livia and co have left consists of various shady suspects being summoned to the police station and investigated in an attempt to trip them up.

Montalbano is ever susceptible to female charms but, in loyalty to Livia (who has proved a useful excuse for escape on previous occasions) has never succumbed. However, in this story, he meets his match, which perhaps sets things up for some movement in his rather static relationship with Livia in future books.

Eventually, "The light breeze on the veranda had matured from infancy to adolescence and was making itself felt. He decided to seize this favourable moment when his thoughts weren't log-jammed by the heat, and consider rationally the investigation he had on his hands." The metaphor continues, and Montalbano, mainly by pursuing a few avenues that he'd omitted earlier, closes in on his man. Nevertheless, the denouement is engineered by someone else, rendering him a mere spectator, and a frustrated one to boot.

AUGUST HEAT is not the strongest of this charming series of books, though the superb translation and sheer good humour raises many a smile, not least in the passage of homage to Maj Sjowell and Per Wahloo, the Swedish writers of the ten-book Martin Beck series. If you have read the previous books by Camilleri, you'll enjoy this one regardless, but if you haven't, the story may seem somewhat flat and the finer points will be lost. As usual, the translation is utterly sympathetic and a work of art in its own right. The final footnote by the translator is well worth reading, in describing Camilleri's efforts to support the victims of Mafia violence.

Review first published at Euro Crime, July 2009.

Frozen Tracks

Although long, FROZEN TRACKS is a satisfying read, both in terms of plot and characterisation. Edwardson introduced his series characters DCI Erik Winter and colleagues in his two previous books, SUN AND SHADOW and NEVER END, and in this third outing the characters have matured into a familiar team with distinct identities. (Thankfully yet unusually, Edwardson's novels so far have been published as translations in series order, though starting with the third in the series rather than the first.)

In the run-up to Christmas in Gothenburg, two sets of crimes are occurring. The more dramatic sequence involves a series of young men who are brutally attacked at night, possibly with a branding iron. More subtly, various young children tell their parents that a strange "mister" has taken them for a ride in his car. This second, disturbing set of crimes goes undiscovered for some time, partly because they occur in the suburbs so are reported to different police stations who do not communicate efficiently, and partly because there is some doubt in both the parents' and police minds as to whether the children are making up their stories.

Part of the novel is a straight police-procedural investigation, describing how the detectives seek out clues and gradually piece together evidence. Although there is no indication that the two sets of crimes are connected, the reader suspects that they might be, and indeed this proves to be the case. However, because there are two apparently distinct investigations, the chapters told from the point of view of the criminal have an uneasy feel to them, as the reader is never sure which crimes the perpetrator is responsible for.

I like the characters of Winter, his team and the descriptions of their domestic lives. As with everything else in this book, these are understated, but effective – Winter's new family and the gradual steps that the bereaved Halvers is taking towards a new family life are absorbing.

There is also plenty of dry humour in the book, but where it really comes into its own are the descriptions of the young children and their accounts of their experiences. Edwardson also writes books for children, and Winter's (and other police staff's) questioning of their young witnesses is portrayed with great believability and sensitivity. I was not quite as compelled by the scenes of rural life, but this is a minor point in a book that overall is a good, old-fashioned (in the best sense) read. Laurie Thompson turns in his usual superb translation, conveying vernacular and jokes with apparent ease.

First published at Euro Crime, August 2009.

Suffer the Children

DI Will Wagstaffe, who is universally known as Staffe, is a policeman with problems. His parents were killed by a Basque bomb while on holiday while Staffe was a teenager; ever since he has been working with the Spanish police to track down the killers. He's just off to continue this quest, in the guise of a holiday, when he hears of a murder on the run-down Limekiln estate in his patch, "Leadengate" (a fictional area of London). Foregoing his trip to investigate the crime, we rapidly learn of Staffe's failed relationship with Sylvie; his hankering for his junior colleague Julie; his sense of responsibility for his drug-addicted sister Marie, a single parent whose boyfriend beats her up; guilt over Jessop, his ex-partner and mentor who has been forced into early retirement; and to cap it all, Staffe has just compromised himself in court in order to bang up a member of the "eGang". On the bright side, he is very well off, having used the compensation money from his parents' deaths to begin a second career as a property speculator. He now owns several houses in London, very useful for his rather complex life, and for helping out Marie (who has long-since blown her share of the compensation).

This busy background is worked into the plot that is kick-started by the Limekiln estate murder. The victim has in the past been accused, but not convicted, of a sex crime against a child. He's been killed in a particularly sadistic way, and the killer has left no trace of his (or her) crime. Soon, a second assault takes place - this one an even more sadistic and nasty ritual, which is unfortunately explained in some detail. The victim, Guy Montefiore, is a paedophile who is not allowed near his own daughter, and who has been stalking another teenage girl. Staffe manages to rescue Montefiore before he dies because someone, presumably the attacker, phones to alert him. Pennington, Staffe's unsympathetic boss, is suspicious of Staffe's own role in the attack, and wants to hand the case over to the Met. Staffe is convinced that the cases are related, so begs to keep control of the investigation - but his unorthodox methods enrage Pennington further.

Somewhere in SUFFER THE CHILDREN is a good story trying to get out. But because the book is stuffed with so many disparate themes, it has insufficient drive and pace. Staffe himself is the strongest element in the novel - some of his personal dilemmas are a bit cliched, but he's an interesting character with room for development. The plot, however, is far too bitty - gruesome serial killer, possible police conspiracy, a vigilante group that might or might not exist, whether the injured Montefiore will regain consciousness or if he'll be killed in his hospital bed, a mysterious video-embedded website, and what seems like endless witness and suspect interviews that are hard to keep distinct.

Unfortunately, by the time I reached the three-quarter point of SUFFER THE CHILDREN, I had ceased to become involved, and although I did finish it, I was not all that interested in the outcome. I was not quite convinced, once the identity of the killer(s) was revealed after a few red herrings, that it all stacked up. Fewer characters, themes and plot-lines would have made this a stronger book, so I hope that in future the author will decide that "less is more".

First published at Euro Crime, August 2009.

The Water's Edge

Translated by Charlotte Barslund.
Karin Fossum brings her usual cool empathy to this apparently simple tale of a married couple out for a Sunday afternoon walk in the forest, who discover the body of a young boy. The wife, Kristine, is deeply upset by the discovery, which brings into focus her own long-standing desire for a child, and the refusal of her husband, Reinhardt, to have a family. Reinhardt, on the other hand, is excited by the discovery, taking photos of the boy on his mobile phone (to the shock of Kristine) so he can show his friends, who he invites round for a grim dinner party to regale them with the find, and even, later on, attending the funeral of the dead boy and witnessing the mother's grief.

The first half of this novel is more of a dissection of a marriage than a mystery. Kristine sees a man walking away from her just before discovering the dead boy, and it seems likely that he's the perpetrator. Rather than condemning, the author remains non-judgemental and detached, showing the reader how life appears not only from the criminal's perspective but also through the eyes of detectives Sejer and Skarre, who seek to understand how someone could be a paedophile, rather than starting a witch-hunt. To this end, the police colleagues interview Philip Akeson, a sex offender who has done his time and been released back into society - and although like everyone, I find the whole subject of sex offences revolting (particularly where children are involved), I admire the author for going where few dare to tread, presenting the arguments fairly and even with sympathy and humour, not least because Akeson is shown as being rather likeable.

Half-way though the book, a second boy disappears. His name is Edwin and he's obese. He went to the same primary school as Jonas August, the dead boy, so detectives and village-folk alike suspect that the same person is responsible. By now, the reader knows quite a bit about Jonas August's killer, and we know it isn't the con-man boyfriend of Edwin's mother or the gay teacher at school who is very friendly to all the boys and invites them to his house to do jigsaws (to the consternation of his partner) - but never asks the girls. Who is implicated in Edwin's disappearance is an open question, however.

As usual, I am very impressed by Karin Fossum's talent and originality. In THE WATER'S EDGE she has taken an upsetting and controversial topic– the painful death of a child or children - and has made it palatable and interesting even to a sensitive reader who, frankly, cannot usually bear to think about the subject. The author uses the events in the book to look at people, their attitudes and relationships, in both small and large ways. Some of these are fleeting - how the villagers react to immigrant farm workers or the parents' association's suspicion of the gay teacher once Edwin disappears - and others are dissected in more detail, such as Kristine's gradual pulling away from her dominant marriage partner, or the study of Edwin's mother. All of this is done with insight, yet the mystery builds up almost under the surface of the book and, by the end of the novel, is sufficiently resolved for us to know what happened, without having all the loose ends artificially tied up.

Sejer and Skarre are relatively insubstantial characters, serving mainly to keep the plot going and to provide a neutral vehicle for the exploration of various human behaviours. Occasionally one of them might have a personal reflection, for example Sejer thinks of his daughter and his grandson - but on the whole their personal lives remain on the back-burner while the author looks at the reflections from all the faces of the prism of her characters and the situations that they have created for themselves. This is a wonderful book, short and haunting, and beautifully naturally translated. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

First published at Euro Crime, July 2009.

The Chalk Circle Man

Translated by Sian Reynolds.

So I come to the last book I have to read that is on the shortlist for the 2009 International Dagger award. It’s French, and the first in the Adamsberg series that has already won Fred Vargas this award for two years in succession (2006 and 2007).
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has been, until the start of this novel, a provincial police inspector of great unconventionality but with an unusually high success rate in solving cases. Therefore, as the novel opens, he’s recently promoted to commissioner in the Parisian force, and we see his eccentricities through the eyes of his close colleague, Inspector Danglard – himself a single parent of two sets of twins and additionally looking after a fifth child belonging to but abandoned by his ex-wife and her lover. Adamsberg has an instinctive, bordering on supernatural, style, as is shown by an initial vignette in which he correctly identifies the criminal in a case long before any evidence is found to force a confession from the suspect.
Despite the internal and external strangenesses of the sensual Adamsberg and the lugubrious Danglard, the story told in The Chalk Circle Man is at its heart a straightforward police procedural. Someone is drawing chalk circles on the Parisian streets at night, leaving strange objects in their centres. Adamsberg’s forebodings about the person behind this activity are soon borne out when a murdered body is found inside one of the circles. Despite intensive police activity, other murders follow, at different parts of the city.
An eccentric range of suspects is assembled even before the first body is found. An academic whose research speciality is deep-sea fish, Mathilde, has a hobby of following people round the city. One of these characters, a beautiful blind man called Paul Reyer, has disappeared and Mathilde, professing to be worried, reports him as missing to the police. She is ignored by all but Adamsberg, who rapidly finds the “missing” man (not missing at all). Soon, Reyer and another wanderer on the streets, an elderly woman called Clemence, are lodging with Mathilde in her fish-obsessed house. Clemence is addicted to answering lonely-hearts adverts, but is perpetually disappointed because each time she arranges to meet someone, he immediately abandons the old woman on sight.
How these three oddballs are going to become involved in the chalk circle story is not clear – but involved they are, not only with the mystery but also, in Mathilde’s case, with Adamsberg in a much more personal sense. As events reach their climax, the author plays fair with her readers and provides a satisfying, if sad, solution to the bizarre conundrum. At the same time, the author has piqued the reader's interest in the affectionate relationship (mainly unspoken) between Adamserg and Danglard, two men of very different outlook, to be explored further in future novels.
Much has been written about Vargas's alternative universe. I see her characters as acting like children in adult’s bodies. This novel is a fable, in which people live out their impulses, creative or destructive, without thought of consequence. Nobody plans for the future, living in the existential present. Yet the motivation of the murderer is cold and logically carried out – and would pass muster in a novel firmly rooted in pedestrian reality.
The book is peppered with acute social observations; cynical yet funny barbs at the media and  modern society (the excerpts from the newspaper reports of the chalk circles are hilarious); and myriad tiny delights – Mathilde’s plan to spend a day following a man who is interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, Clemence’s pointed teeth for which Mathilde likes to provide zoological comparisons, or little exchanges between Adamsberg and Danglard about Byzantium and the emperor Justinian (actually highly relevant to the mystery). If the reader is prepared to take this world as it is, then the book is very satisfying. Its eccentricities are charming (though the author is ruthless within her creation, which is no fairy tale) – they are bound up in the pace and focus of the novel, rather than distracting the reader from these essentials.
Thanks to Karen Meek of Euro Crime for my proof copy of the book.

First posted on Petrona, July 2009.

The Redeemer

Translated by Don Bartlett.

In the cold of winter in Oslo, Harry Hole is investigating the case of a young drug addict who has apparently committed suicide among the containers in a shipyard. He's undecided about his future with the police force: although he has achieved closure concerning the death of his colleague (described in three previous novels: The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star), the reverberations have left him even more outside the mainstream than before. His lover Rakel has rejected him in favour of a careerist doctor. What's more, his sympathetic boss, Bjarne Moller, has retired and been replaced by a stickler for discipline, Gunnar Hagan. It isn't long before Harry and his new boss are rubbing each other up the wrong way, as Hagan reacts against Harry's intuitive and freewheeling approach (no doubt he would be shocked at Harry's failure ever to have had business cards printed).
Harry is nothing if not a good detective, though, and rapidly unearths the facts behind the young man's death which his younger, slicker colleagues have overlooked. His method of solving the case proves critical to the climax of the next investigation, which takes up the bulk of the book.
An assassin from Vukovar is in Oslo, whose target is a member of the Salvation Army. We are told the life story of the assassin, known as the Little Redeemer for his actions in the terrible wars during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. We also learn a great amount about the workings of the Norwegian branch of the Salvation Army, the raging jealousies and relationship traumas of its younger members, and the shady business dealings concerning the lucrative properties that the Army owns in Oslo. I admired the fact that the author managed to keep me interested in the story of the Little Redeemer, because the 'disaffected assassin' theme is one that crops up quite often in thrillers and tends to create a sense of deja vu.(For an example of an excellent book in this subgenre, I highly recommend The Serbian Dane by Leif Davidson.)
I was less interested in the Salvation Army characters, finding most of them (the men, certainly) either unsympathetic or not well-drawn, or both. I would prefer to have read more about Harry, his personal life and his colleagues. As the plot thickens - and it is a very fast-moving, exciting plot - there are a couple of rather gruesome set-pieces, as well as another tragedy that strikes the Oslo police team. Harry himself presses on with the investigation, finding himself drawn to one of the Army members, which of course distracts him from his pursuit of the Redeemer. As I've found previously with this author, the final disentangling of who hired the assassin and why does really stretch credulity - however, the story of the Redeemer and his circumstances are, perhaps because more simple, rather moving, and I was pleased by Harry's choices in the end-game.
Although you don't need to have read the earlier books in the series to enjoy The Redeemer, I think you'll enjoy it a lot more if you have done. There are nuances running throughout the text, for example Harry's relationship with watches and with his retired ex-boss, that won't make much sense in isolation of the previous novels. I think the Harry Hole books comprise one of the top police-procedural series being written today. Although the books have flaws, they are flaws of ambition - the plots are very clever, and if perhaps they are sometimes a bit too clever, that's better than the opposite. These novels are thoughtful, intelligent, exciting and above all, have a great central character.

'You're moving into a difficult area for theologians, Hole. Are you a Christian?'
'No. I'm a detective. I believe in proof.'

I recommend reading all the books - in the right order. (English readers won't have been able to read the first two chronological novels in the series, which have not yet been translated, but the next one, The Snowman, will be out in English fairly soon, and follows directly on from The Redeemer.)

First posted on Petrona, July 2009.