Genre: Nordic Noir

Nordic noir is a genre comprising crime fiction written in the Nordic countries with certain common characteristics, typically in a realistic style with a dark, morally complex mood, breaking away from the older “whodunit” influenced by the British country house murder mystery.

Mini Review: The Boy in the Headlights

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Gutten som elsket rådyr
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, Book # 3
Doubleday
September 2018
Paperback
384
Norwegian
October 15, 2021 October 19, 2021
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Winter 1999. An old man is driving home when his headlights catch an animal on the empty road up ahead. He stamps hard on the brakes. But it is not an animal at all. It is a young boy, frightened and alone, with a set of deer antlers strapped firmly to his head.

Fourteen years later, a body is found in a mountain lake. Within weeks, three people have died. Each time, the killer has left a clue, inviting Special Investigations Detectives Munch and Krüger to play a deadly game – a game they cannot possibly win. Against the most dangerous and terrifying kind of serial killer. One who chooses their victims completely at random.

To find the killer they must look deep within their own dark pasts, but how can you stop a murderer when you cannot begin to predict their next move?

About the book

The body of a young woman is found in a lake by a little boy who can finally go fishing with his father. Mia is about to leave for the Caribbean, Munch lives with his ex-wife to be close to his daughter after the events of the last book. Due to the new case, the team is reunited.

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Liv

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Liv
Liv
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, Book # 2
Scribe
August 2016
Paperback
400
Swedish
Paul Norlen
April 15, 2019 April 21, 2019

Death, death, death!’ Ellen screamed, hitting the steering wheel so hard her palms ached.

Crime reporter Ellen Tamm hasn’t been the same since the Lycke case a few months ago. It is now August and all summer she has been on sick leave, shut in her apartment and spinning out of control. Under pressure — and threats — from her parents and her employer, TV4, she agrees to head home to her family farm, Örelo, to try to get some help and get a handle on her mental health.

On her way to Örelo, Ellen stops for petrol in the little community of Stentuna where she stumbles upon the news of a murdered woman, her body discovered in the small hours of the morning. The woman isn’t from the area, and no one seems to know who she is or what she was doing in Stentuna. Her name was Liv.

Attempting to distract herself from her own dark past and the mysteries that plague her, Ellen starts to investigate Liv’s death. She finds herself drawn into a web of family secrets, lies, and betrayal. Reports keep surfacing of strange behaviour among the children of Stentuna. And then awful things start to happen to Ellen. Someone, or perhaps many people, are trying to silence her.

All the while, Ellen is trying in vain to escape the questions that continue to press in on her and crowd her mind: questions about her sister, the lake, and what really happened that terrible day.

About the book

In this book we find reporter Ellen Tam in crisis after the events of the first book. So she decides to go back to her mother’s home to spend a period in which to rest and recover from the previous events. But when she gets home, she finds herself involved in a murder. Despite the sabbatical period she returns to work because she wants to know why a young woman died.

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The Wire In the Blood

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The Wire In the Blood
, , ,

, Book # 2
HarperCollins
1997
ebook
532
English
January 14, 2019 January 21, 2019

Young girls are disappearing around the country, and there is nothing to connect them to one another, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind. Dr Tony Hill, head of the new National Profiling Task Force, sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of missing teenagers and asked to discover any possible links between the cases. Only one officer comes up with a theory – a theory that is ridiculed by the group … until one of their number is murdered and mutilated. For Tony Hill, the murder becomes a matter for personal revenge and, joined by colleague Carol Jordan, he embarks on a campaign of psychological terrorism – a game where hunter and hunted can all too easily be reversed.

About the book

After solving the case in the previous book, The Mermaids Singing, Tony Hill has finally managed to get funds for a special task force to solve serial killer cases. In this second volume, we find Tony teaching some agents how to solve cases with psychology. He gives a task to his “pupils”, finding the connection between different cases of missing teenagers. Only Shaz sees a connection and is convinced who the culprit is, but nobody believes her. Only Tony sees that maybe she is on the right track but will he be able to stop her before she makes any mistakes?

Meanwhile, Carol Jordan is busy with her team in a case of a pyromaniac and her superiors force her to contact Tony for a psychological profile of the pyromaniac.

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Dark Secrets

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Dark Secrets
Det fördolda
, , ,
,
, Book # 1
Grand Central Publishing
2010
ebook
456
Swedish
Marlaine Delargy
March 27, 2018 April 4, 2018

It all begins with a call to the police. A sixteen-year-old boy, Roger Eriksson, has gone missing in the town of Västerås. A search is organized and a group of young scouts makes an awful discovery in a marsh: Roger is dead.

Meanwhile, Sebastian Bergman, psychologist, criminal profiler and one of Sweden's top experts on serial killers, is in Västerås to settle his mother's estate following her death. Sebastian has withdrawn from police work after the death of his wife and daughter in the 2004 tsunami.

When the Crime Investigation Department asks Sebastian for his help in Roger's case, his arrogant manner at first alienates the rest of the team. Pushing forward, though, they begin to make disturbing discoveries about the private school Roger attended....

About the book

Here it is another Einaudi book and here it is another book full of spelling mistakes. For the Italian version, what annoys me the most are the “yes” (sì) with the accent on the other way (I don’t even have the key on the keyboard to make that accent, how the hell do they print it?). Unfortunately, it interrupts the reading too much

As for the style, in my version the narrator’s point of views jump from one to another a little too much. For example, in one chapter Frederick starts talking about his feelings (even if in the third person) all of a sudden the team leader is talking (telling his feelings about another topic whatsoever). And this is not well defined, there is no space between the two narrators so you find yourself thinking “what the hell are they saying?”.

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