Author: Karin Fossum
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WARTY!
Translated by Charlotte Barslund (no website found).
If it's December nointh, then we're reviewing a novel which has a title starting with 'I'!
I don’t really have polite enough words to describe how god-awful this novel was. I've read Scandinavian works of this nature before and enjoyed them, so I thought this might be interesting too, but it was just the opposite. I managed to finish the book, because the writing itself wasn't technically bad (although this was a translation, I can’t speak for the original), but in terms of plot and execution, it was without a doubt the most insipid, ponderous, uninspiring, tedious, frustrating, meandering, clueless, vapid, dissipated so-called 'mystery' I've ever read.
I know full-well that in the US we’re overdosed on the formulaic and the shallow, and on the template-driven must-be-tidily-wrapped-in-forty-minutes crime stories from TV. I know the books aren’t that much better, but even when pushing that aside and adopting a more cosmopolitan approach to crime stories, this novel still stands out as being completely lackluster, and so bad it was squirm-inducing. Do police in Norway never ever do any forensic work? Do they never follow clues? Are they really more interested in talking about their sick dog with the prime murder suspect than ever they are in discussing the actual crime? I sincerely hope not.
We're told that the woman was attacked and ran and was finally brought down. We find a suspect with scratch marks on his face, yet never once is the question of whether the victim has skin under her fingernails raised. It’s apparently something which the forensic people failed to check. Seriously? I've never been to Norway, but my instinct is that their police and crime work is very much like it is in the US and any other modernized country, yet if we’re to trust this author's writing, Norway is no better than any severely underprivileged and under-funded third world country for how technologically backward it is! Frankly I don’t believe that.
Do suspects routinely submit themselves to endless hours of questioning without ever having their lawyer anywhere near? The main suspect's lawyer is in this novel for about one page and that's it. We never see or hear from him again! He is never once present when the suspect is questioned. The suspect offers all kinds of support for his assertion that he did not do it, and the police fail to follow-up on any of it. One of his items of supportive evidence is actually proven to favor him - but totally by accident, and it never gets raised again. Is this how criminals are brought to book in Norway - pick someone who seems a likely suspect and interrogate him endlessly without a lawyer until he breaks down and confesses - and then blindly assume that this proves that this guy did it?
I sincerely hope that Norwegian police are not as hopeless, clueless, mindless, and useless as Inspector Sejer and his assistant are. The assistant attracts the stalker-ish attention of one of the primary witnesses, who is a young girl, yet when she calls him to tell him she thought there was a man in her yard watching her, he tells her he's off-duty and can’t help her, and he turns over and goes to sleep. Later she's attacked, evidently by this same man. She calls this assistant and he tells her to call her mother! I kid you not. That's his response when a citizen tells him she was attacked; then he turns over and goes to sleep. What happened to her is never resolved or explained. It’s never even followed up. It’s just let go.
There isn't a single person in the entire town who steps forward and openly volunteers information. Everyone holds back and fails to report important things until they're outed by someone else, or until they finally break down and 'fess up what they know. There's no explanation at all given for any of this behavior. I guess we're just supposed to assume that Norwegians love to let major crimes happen and the perps get away with it! One guy - and for no reason at all - disposes of evidence in a lake. It’s just not realistic that every single person would be like that. There are half-a dozen suspects, yet not one of them is properly investigated. Does Fossum really want us to believe her country is like this? Her people are like this?
Inspector Sejer is the most misnamed character ever, since he inspects nothing! Usually the inspector in a story like this is someone who has something going for him: he's really good at seeing through the trees to the forest (or vice-versa!), or he's is acutely observant, or he's brilliantly deductive, or he's great at getting people to expose their own guilt. Sejer is none of these things. Sejer needs to be retired.
In the old TV series Columbo, Peter Falk played a rather rambling, bumbling detective, but underneath that you knew he was sly and calculating, and brilliant at getting people to admit things they really wanted to conceal. Sejer is just like Columbo, but without any of Columbo's positive traits or results! Instead, he really is slow, dull, bumbling, hesitant, un-stimulating, uninventive, unadventurous; a plodding chunk of sheer boredom. He shows no brilliance in anything. Finally he decides, for no good reason at all, that it’s this one particular guy, who has no solid evidence against him, and that guy's arrested and charged without further ado or investigation. We never actually learn if he really did it. This is a first for me in a murder mystery!
The writer is supposedly the Queen of Crime in her home nation, and I can subscribe to that if the crime is lousy plotting and atrocious execution, but if the title is intended as a positive one, meaning that she's the best, then the rest of the Norwegian crime fiction writers must be a sorry lot indeed. I weep for them, but I honestly don't believe that the writer of this novel is the queen of anything but cluelessness.
This book is one of several in the Sejer series. How this lousy approach to writing a detective series ever progressed that far is the only real mystery here.
