Those Who Follow
Wienerbrorskapet
Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Ingar Johnsrud
Fredrik Beier, Book # 1
Aschehoug
January 15th, 2015
ebook
445
Norwegian
January 26, 2018 February 8, 2018
What starts off as a simple case of a missing person soon turns into a hunt for a brutal killer in a drama involving the members of a doomsday cult and monstrous experiments in racial purity dating all the way back to World War II. However, the tie to the past is yet to be uncovered when Superintendent Fredrik Beier is called to the scene of a mass murder in the outskirts of Oslo. The victims belonged to the isolationist doomsday cult "the Light of God". Initially, everything seems to point to a religious vendetta, but Fredrik and his new partner Kafa Iqbal are sceptical and soon another line of inquiry emerges. Fredrik suddenly finds himself in the middle of a murder case, hunting not only for a faceless killer, but also for answers as to what lies hidden in the sect leaders' mysterious pasts.
About the book
A Norwegian Christian sect is brutally attacked on their farm. A lot of the members are slaughtered, while others disappear. The police find a chemical laboratory when they arrive on the scene. Everything points to an Islamic group, but policemen Kafa Iqbal and Fredrik Beier discover that there is a bigger conspiracy, composed by a group of scientists who met in the 30s in Vienna.
First of all I have to talk about the Italian edition, about how it is written. I do not like how it is printed. The translation is bad, you don’t understand where a speech ends because it uses the dash to start, but not to finish. It’s true, there is the point at the end and a new line, but not having something graphic that breaks the narrative, the reading isn’t smooth. Often the thoughts are mixed to the narration or even to the dialogue. I’m not a writer, but I’ve never seen a book written or translated in Italian with this style. And then the graphic and grammatical errors. All the “i” with the graphic accent are wrong, “ì” is the Italian one, the other, I don’t know what language it is from, because we don’t use it, it’s not even on the keyboard! “Sì”, non “sí”, “scoprì”, non “scoprí”. Any spell check on any computer should correct it… Even now that I’m writing them wrongly, Chrome reports it! And also the “u” with the wrong graphic accent… “Ventitré” without accent? Are you joking? “Lucusta” instead of “locusta” (even in English is “locust” with an “o”. I know I make mistakes in English, I’m not perfect and it’s not my language, I try to look for errors but I don’t catch them all, but that is a very big Publisher in Italy, I can’t understand why they sent to print such an incorrect version, it seems like a draft.
Now about the book. There are some clues that aren’t used correctly. For example, when Jørgen’s wife calls a phone she finds and the party leader answers, why the police don’t question him immediately? I need to read 20 chapters before they question him? I liked the book, don’t get me wrong, I did give it 5 stars, it’s not too talkative and too long, I just don’t understand how the author uses certain narrative clues.
This review is more about the bad edition of the book in Italian than on the actual book, so let’s see…
I loved the theme of the book, I have a degree in chemical science, I like lab work and I know that there is a lot of work that goes beyond technological innovation, but I like to read about extreme situations, about what a sick mind can do with what I have studied and that I would use to do good, not to eliminate a race or the human species. And I sincerely hope that some things said in the book are not real, for example when they say that Russia and the United States have smallpox strains as a precaution. But they say this in TV series so it’s very likely that it is true and considering who is in charge of the strongest power in the world (or so they say) I see a very dark future.
I also like that there are references to the past, that it talks about experiments made by crazy people, because despite being very bad, often to read of the suffering of others makes us open our eyes on what happens in the world.
