After a case in which he was very much the main story (The Hunting Dogs, 2014), it’s good to see Wisting cast once more as...
Veteran Chief Inspector William Wisting of the Larvik Police Department is faced with a pair of unusual cases: two men who were dead for four months before anyone so much as missed them.
The U.N. may consider Norway the best country in the world, but it’s still possible for some people to live and die in such lonely isolation that no one notices. One such person is Wisting’s neighbor Viggo Hansen, whose virtually mummified corpse is discovered sitting in front of his television only because he hasn’t paid his utility bill. Another is the anonymous victim found beneath the snow at a Christmas tree farm without a mark to indicate how he died four months earlier. Genre fans will immediately suspect that the two deaths are neither innocuous nor unconnected. But since Wisting focuses on trying to identify the snowbound corpse while his daughter, Line, an investigative journalist, toils in alternating chapters to recover a back story for the neighbor she never really knew, the two cases don’t begin to converge, or even to establish themselves as criminal cases, until they’re both linked to Robert Godwin, the Interstate Strangler who escaped the police in Minneapolis years ago and went to ground in Norway in a surprising, logical, and deeply disturbing fashion. Horst keeps the long second act in which Wisting works with an international task force while Line interviews one acquaintance of Viggo’s after another brimming with tension, slowly building suspense as the two searches cross paths in increasingly intricate ways; only the much briefer and more melodramatic third act, which inevitably makes the search personal for Wisting, is disappointingly predictable.
After a case in which he was very much the main story (The Hunting Dogs, 2014), it’s good to see Wisting cast once more as the dogged detective in this solid, unspectacular procedural.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910124-04-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
Sundance Now to Air TV Show of Wisting Mysteries
Advertising executive Patterson doubles neither our pleasure nor our fun by giving us two intense, Hannibal Lecter-type murderers for the price of one in an improbable and hopelessly derivative mess of a thriller. Feds and local authorities on both coasts are baffled by a pair of serial killers targeting beautiful young women: The Gentleman Caller works the scene in sunny L.A., where he brutally murders and dismembers his prey; his counterpart back East, who calls himself Casanova, trolls the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area for sexy coeds to victimize. Their MOs provide plenty of fodder for an author trying to cook up a work of psychological terror: Both are powerful, handsome, brilliant (natch), commit perfect crimes, and, despite their busy schedules, manage to keep in touch with each other. To catch them, you obviously need a perfect crime fighter. Enter Alex Cross, the Washington, D.C., detective/psychologist hero of bestselling Along Came A Spider (1993), who gets dragged into all this after his niece Naomi, a student at Duke University, vanishes. Working with the authorities and a medical student named Kate McTiernan, who was lucky enough to escape Casanova's clutches, Cross begins to understand how the two dueling psychos operate. Just in the nick of time, too, because the Gentleman Caller, on the run from the law out West, decides that nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina with his old buddy Casanova. So, what does Cross, whose favorite niece is now in the clutches of two sickos, do? Fall in love with Kate McTiernan, of course, in an ill-placed romantic subplot intended to raise the stakes in the deadly cat-and-mouse game. Does Cross save Naomi? Are the two killers brought to justice or, at the very least, consigned to gory demises? Who cares? As a storyteller, Patterson is a great ad copywriter.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-69370-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
Careful research, a driving plot, wry wit, and compelling characters make this a most entertaining read.
The real-life Victorian police detective who was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Mr. Bucket serves as the main character in a fast-paced historical mystery.
Although this is Mason’s debut novel for adults, he’s an accomplished playwright. Those skills are evident in the crisp dialogue and well-structured scenes of this book. It begins with a bang in 1860 as Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field, assigned to guard Queen Victoria and Prince Albert during a public appearance, witnesses an assassination attempt. The shooter, who’s arrested, is mentally ill, but Field quickly begins to suspect the man is just a tool of a conspiracy—one connected to the controversy over the new ideas of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Field’s determined pursuit of the truth is sometimes snagged by his celebrity; Dickens fans, including some in the royal family, insist on calling him “Mr. Bucket” and confusing the fictional policeman with the real one. Field persists, however, plunging into a dizzyingly complex plot that takes him all over London and off to Germany. The cast of characters teems with satisfyingly despicable villains, many of them based on real aristocrats and scientists. The most villainous, however, is the memorably terrifying Decimus Cobb, a former choirboy–turned–Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter. Countering Cobb and the other bad guys are the earnestly heroic Field, his resourceful wife, a kidnapped butcher’s boy, and Prince Albert, who gets a touchingly human portrayal. There are cameos by such famous figures as Karl Marx, Dickens, and, of course, Darwin. With many grisly murders and many shocking surprises along the way, the book rockets toward a last dark twist.
Careful research, a driving plot, wry wit, and compelling characters make this a most entertaining read.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-634-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
