Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions

Detective: Konrad Sejer

Setting:     Norway

Time:        Current

Genre:      Scandi Noir

Once again, a different tone in a Karin Fossum novel. There is no gruesome killing. There is no race to find the killer before there are too many bodies. For a detective story, one might actually say it was gentle.

A young man staying with two friends by a lake on a weekend's outing from the hospital where he was being treated for depression, falls out of a rowing boat they are all in at night and disappears into the muddy waters. No attempt is made to save him. His friends choose to invent a fiction that he has disappeared from the cabin overnight and may have committed suicide and this is what they report to the police. There are allusions to some nefarious deed the three of them have been involved in.

When the body is fond, the story of the possible suicide does not ring true to Konrad Sejer, but he has no proof otherwise.

Later another body is found in another lake, that of a young man missing for some months. Is this death accidental. How are the three friends connected to it?

The story is well written and the plot unfurls nicely.

Rating A

Web site referring to Karin Fossum  although this book is not listed

Previously Read

Dont Look Back

What the Devil Holds

The Caller

Karin Fossum

The Caller

Detective: Konrad Sejer
Location:  Norway
Time:        Present
Genre;      Scandi-Noir

There's something quite different about Fossum's novel, her eighth featuring Konrad Sejer. This is not about a murder and its solution. It's about a maladjusted and negelected young man who vents his discontent on the world through seemingly harmless but still malicious practical jokes such as covering a sleeping baby with animal blood,  posting  a premature death notice for an old lady or sending a mother rushing to a hospital following a false call that her daughter had had a traffic accident. Fossum explores the impact of the hoaxes on the lives of the victims, particularly the parents of the blood covered child.

There is no intentional murder but the hoaxes seem to culminate in the horrific death of a child which may or may not have been the fault of the hoaxer followed quite quickly by the accidental death of the young man's much loved grandfather, as far as the police know at the hands of the hoaxer's drunkard mother. But the reader knows better. 

Eventually the hoaxer meets his fate and only the little girl who has been one of his victims knows the truth.

Rating A

Web site about Karen Fossum

Other Inspector Sejer Books read previously

Don't Look Back (1)
When the Devil Holds (3)