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
As usual in this white-hot series (Fractured, 2008, etc.), the ongoing psychological warfare and the physical violence that...
A Georgia student’s murder is solved all too quickly and violently—in a way that tears apart her community, fuels the hatred between Det. Lena Adams and former Medical Examiner Sara Linton, and promises still further violence.
If it hadn’t been for the telltale cut on the back of her neck, Allison Spooner’s death would have looked like suicide, complete with motive and farewell note. Shortly after Lena realizes that Allison’s been murdered, a routine search of Allison’s place leads to a sudden, bloody confrontation with a masked intruder that leaves all three officers involved—Lena, Det. Brad Stephens and interim police chief Frank Wallace—wounded. Miraculously, the intruder doesn’t escape. Arrested none too gently, Tommy Braham confesses that he killed Allison because she spurned his advances. But his story, though it conveniently fits the facts of the crime, seems to require a killer who’s both more intelligent and less weepy than him. When Sara, just returned to Heartsdale for a visit, arrives at the jail in response to a mysterious phone call, she finds Tommy dead. Furious at the incompetence of Lena, whom she still holds responsible for her husband’s death (Beyond Reach, 2007), Sara phones the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who send Special Agent Will Trent to determine the question of Tommy’s innocence or guilt—and incidentally to referee the latest round of the long feud between the two women.
As usual in this white-hot series (Fractured, 2008, etc.), the ongoing psychological warfare and the physical violence that punctuates it are far more memorable than the unmasking of the real killer.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-34197-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Philip Marlowe's Ave atque Vale runs to about 500 pages, through the sanguine incidents which attend his casual involvement with Terry Lennox, a rich woman's kept poodle whom he picks up in a bar. The murder of Sylvia Lennox takes Terry to Mexico, and a confession-suicide (and political influence) closes the case- but not for Marlowe who keeps it alive on a trail of hellcats and hoodlums, a writer with a massive guilt complex and a lovely, loose bitch, to a second murder and its relentless finale... Chandler, a literary roughneck, is probably the most polished exponent of this form of highbrow- lowbrow entertainment and has few equals if many imitators.
Pub Date: March 18, 1954
ISBN: 0394757688
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1954
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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