Review by New York Times Review
KARIN FOSSUM may be the most unsentimental crime novelist since Ruth Rendell's alter ego, Barbara Vine. On the very first page of HELL FIRE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24), a young mother and her 4-year-old son lie dead of multiple stab wounds in the ramshackle little trailer in the Norwegian woods where they had spent the night. Not far into the story, we're introduced to a character who, we'll very soon deduce, is almost certainly the killer. Surprisingly, anticipating the ending doesn't destroy the suspense; in fact, imagining the horror that awaits actually increases our sense of dread. Lacking the reader's omniscience, Inspector Konrad Sejer must painstakingly piece together the lives of the victims by questioning anyone who might have information about this ghastly crime. Sejer is a thoughtful interviewer, "but he was a serious man and sometimes prone to deep melancholy," so it's inevitable that the more this sensitive detective learns, the more depressed he gets. (At least he's not morbid, like the police pathologist who keeps a pinup photo of the deceased Marilyn Monroe, her face "puffy and formless," hanging in the morgue.) The dead woman, Bonnie Hayden, had no intention of becoming a single mother, but when her husband left her for a younger woman she was forced to put their son, Simon, in day care and become a home health aide. Her elderly clients could be difficult, demanding and sometimes quite mean, like cranky old Erna, who worked her like a dray horse. But they're all in mourning at the unusually well-attended funeral, which comforts Inspector Sejer as much as it saddens him. Another parental bond figures in a parallel plot about a mother's boundless love and a son's obsessive need to find his errant father - or at least his grave. Fossum writes with as much compassion about Thomasine and Eddie Malthe as she does about Bonnie and Simon. But in Kari Dickson's translation there's always something dark hovering on the edge of the page, something about getting what you wish for and the crushing irony when that gift proves your undoing. HARLAN COBEN MUST have been reading Dickens while he was writing HOME (Dutton, $28), in which a flamboyant villain known as Fat Gandhi houses the "workers" in his child prostitution ring in the basement of an entertainment arcade called AdventureLand. Coben's goodguy hero, Myron Bolitar, runs afoul of this nasty piece of work when he answers the call of his best bud, Win Lockwood, who has spotted a missing American boy in London among the young hustlers working the stroll under the King's Cross overpass. Myron may be the one with the hero complex and Win the one with the killer instincts ("I am good with a straight razor"), but when Patrick Moore disappeared 10 years earlier, the kidnappers also took Win's 6-year-old cousin - and family is family. Fans of this popular series, which has been on hiatus for five years (since the publication of "Live Wire"), know the drill: You grab the plot thread and hang on for dear life while Coben yanks it into a noose. Promises are also made of "death and destruction and mayhem" and duly delivered in terrific action scenes, including a wild escape through the tunnel beneath Fat Gandhi's empire. Fun is fun, but the lasting appeal of this series lies in Coben's sympathy for ordinary people who do desperate things when they're swept up in circumstances they can't control. LESS THAN A MONTH before World War I comes to an end, Bess Crawford is shot by a German sniper who didn't notice that she was tending to a wounded soldier. In THE SHATTERED TREE (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), Charles Todd's heroic battlefield nurse is shipped off to a hospital in Rouen, but once she's on the mend her thoughts keep turning to one of her patients, a soldier who wore a French uniform but spoke flawless German when he cried out in pain. Although she's meant to be convalescing, Bess finds ways to carry on her search for this mysterious man, whose snapshot so distresses a nun that she calls him "a monster." As always in this immensely satisfying series, Todd heightens the mystery by setting it within a war-shattered world of battered villages, barren farms and broken people. IF EVER A novel should be read with a friend, Sharon Bolton's DAISY IN CHAINS (Minotaur, $25.99) would be it. (You really don't want to face that mind-blowing ending alone.) Serial killers are meant to be creepy, but Hamish Wolfe, the handsome surgeon convicted of murdering four grossly overweight women, is so charismatic he has legions of female fans. Maggie Rose, a well-known attorney and author, isn't one of them. But Hamish's mother is so sure of his innocence she convinces Maggie to begin researching a book that's meant to exonerate him. Even in rough draft form, it's better written than the dodgy articles and blog posts woven into this twisted plot. Fat-shaming is a real issue. "We associate good looks with goodness," Maggie says. "We just do." Our infatuation with vicious criminals also has consequences. Bolton views her psychologically complex characters with such unsettling insight, it's hard to evade certain cold truths - and harder yet not to wince.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Bonnie Hayden and her young son are stabbed to death at a remote Norwegian farm. Konrad Sejer (The Drowned Boy, 2015), introspective and tenacious hunter of wily serial killers and downtrodden perpetrators alike, is hard-pressed to pinpoint someone with motive to kill the home help worker known for her kindness. Sejer methodically picks apart Bonnie's life, from her elderly clients to her estranged husband, revealing a heartbreaking story of a mother's determination to give her son a happy childhood. In a contrasting arc, Mass Malthe and her adult son, Eddie, have developed a comfortable, codependent existence after Eddie's father's long-ago desertion. Disaster lurks, poised to demolish Eddie's safety net, and his determination to learn about his father reveals a lifetime of lies he's unequipped to confront. Fossum, gifted as ever at playing devil's advocate with readers' preconceptions and emotions, cleverly masks Bonnie's and Eddie's roles in the imminent tragedy, and the result is a wrenching portrait of deception in the name of maternal love.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fossum's superb 12th Inspector Sejer mystery (after 2015's The Drowned Boy) opens on a hot summer day in 2005. Inside a disused recreational vehicle, parked in a cluster of trees in rural Norway, lie the bodies of single mother Bonnie Hayden and her four-year-old son, Simon. "Evil incarnate had snuck across the field and stabbed them with a knife," Sejer muses as he examines the crime scene. Flashbacks to December 2004 show Bonnie, a generous woman who cleans the homes of the elderly and infirm, performing her menial duties with stoic dignity. These background scenes also focus on another single mother, Thomasine "Mass" Malthe, and her intelligent but odd 21-year-old son, Eddie, who has trouble dealing with the real world. Fossum explores many themes-most notably, the cruelties of fate-in what is less a police procedural than a portrait of a society in crisis. Few readers will be surprised by the murderer's identity, but the slow, deliberate revelation of the story behind the crime is dramatic and heartbreaking. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Fossum's 12th "Inspector Sejer" title (after The Drowned Boy), the Norwegian police detective investigates the murders of an impoverished mother, barely able to make ends meet, and her young son, found viciously stabbed in their trailer in a secluded area. A bloody footprint is the only clue. The story line shifts back and forth to another mother, who is dying of cancer and reveals hidden secrets to her troubled adult son, Eddie. He soon becomes obsessed with finding out where the father who abandoned him is buried. Sejer is somewhat more contemplative here than usual as he nears retirement but remains focused on finding the killer. Fossum's novel, veiled thinly as a police procedural, is more social commentary about ordinary people struggling to get through life. Verdict For readers unfamiliar with the series, this may not be the one to start with as Sejer and his team take a backseat to the flashbacks of the other characters' lives. For Fossum fans, other Nordic crime fiction authors worth a read are Karin Altvegen or Jo Nesbo.-Frances Thorsen, Chronicles of Crime Bookshop, Victoria, BC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
