Customer Reviews

Don't Look Back (Inspector Sejer Mysteries)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After being widely translated in Europe, it's about time that Fossum's excellent police procedurals are becoming available in English. Unfortunately this first book in translation is the fifth in the series, and so a bit of the background is lacking. The story starts with the disappearance of a young girl in a small Norwegian village, but adroitly segues into a murder investigation as the search for the girl turns up an unrelated naked corpse. The town is one of several small communities served by the city police, and grizzled Inspector Sejer and his younger partner Skarre are assigned to the case.

This is above all a psychological mystery, as Sejer and Skarre carefully poke and prod the small community, where everyone knows everyone else, in order to unravel the tale that led to the killing of a well-liked teenage girl. Although the townspeople have plenty of skeletons in their closets, the story never strays into cliché, as it might have under a less assured hand. Sejer is a placid and cunning detective of late middle age, living alone with his dog after being widowed (again, one senses that his personal life has been detailed in previous books). He bears a certain similarity to Det. Inspector Charlie Resnick, the protagonist of John Harvey's long-running Nottingham procedural series. Skarre works well as his younger, more informal partner, slightly treading on eggshells around his more experienced superior.

With no forensic evidence, no witnesses, and no apparent motive, there's little for them to go on. Thus, Sejer and Skarre spend the whole novel interviewing and reinterviewing everyone who knew the girl and might have seen something. As the tension builds, and various red herrings are dispensed with, Sejer grows convinced that the key to the murder lies in an abrupt change in the girl's behavior almost a year previously. This leads seamlessly to yet another layer within the story. Throughout, every character comes to life, and sometimes, the story shift to their perspective for several pages to add a richer depth to the unfolding investigation. Norway never really emerges as a distinct setting, it's a story that really could have been set in any small town in the first world, but it's an absorbing tale, which ends with a potentially unsettling coda.

PS. Danish television produced a four-hour miniseries from the book under the title "Se Deg Ikke Tilbake." With luck, it might be subtitled in English at some point...

One morning the 6 year old Ragnhild disappears. When ispector Sejer arrives at the house of the deparate mother, the girl soon returns, but the inspector gets another challenge: the dead body of another girl, the 15 year old Annie Holland, a beautiful, athletic and friendly girl that has gone through a dramatic character change in the last year. There are a whole bunch of suspects: her boyfriend Halvor, the ex-husband of her mother, a very vague neighbour, the handball trainer, a father and son who live a little bit further down the road and also a young man with Down syndrome. Sejer and his colleague Skarre have problems finding out who did it and especially the motive behind the murder.

A very readable book that gives a nice insight into the lives of the inhabitants of an ou of the way Norwegian village. A real Scandinavian police novel: not a horrendous lot of action, but very good psychologival description of the various characters.

This fifth book in the Norwegian Inspector Konrad Sejer series, but the first to be published in the US, begins with the most chilling of scenes: 6-year-old Ragnhild accepting a ride from a strange, too eager man. Next we cut to her distraught, terrified mother being gently questioned by Sejer, who shares her dread.

But this scenario does not have the expected conclusion. The search party combing nearby Kollen mountain turn up the naked body of a local teenager, and Ragnhild is deposited on her doorstep by the lonely Downs-syndrome boy who had taken her to his home.

It's a small, close, valley community where everyone knows everyone else, though not as well as they think they do. The dead girl, Annie, had been bright, outgoing and well liked by everyone. Sure, she'd been subdued, even a bit withdrawn in the last few months, but her family and friends put it down to adolescence. Sejer thinks she had a secret.

As he and his assistant, young Jacob Skarre, begin to probe, they peel away layers of deception and self-deception, uncovering cracks and chasms under the tranquil surface. No surprise to Sejer, there are lots of secrets in this respectable, idyllic village, starting right in Annie's family. And there's the boyfriend - brutalized into passivity, he hardly seems her type.

Fossum is particularly adept at revealing character through details. A neighbor views Sejer's approach: "He assumed a strained expression, but then realized that this might make them suspicious; so he pulled himself together and tried a smile instead. Then he remembered that Annie was dead, and went back to the strained mask."

She steeps the story in its semi-rural, woods and mountain atmosphere, but just as telling are the characters' surroundings - a toy-strewn house or a muddy farmyard or a teenager's bedroom. Shifts in point of view heighten the psychological suspense and narrative depth. Sejer is a complex, thoughtful, empathetic character. Readers will hope to spend more time in his company.

This fascinating psychological thriller makes you want to know what other gems have been published in Europe and are waiting for a translator. Japanese writer Matsuo Karino's "Out" was last year's inkling of the great stuff that is slowly finding its way into English. Felicity David's translation of Karen Fossum's book is fluid and immediate, and "Don't Look Back" is a novel that will appeal to readers who like their thrillers flavored with the spice of different cultures.

In the 5th of a popular Norwegian mystery series, now translated for American audiences, Don't Look Back retains all the character, names and places of its geography. Fossum introduces the compassionate Inspector Sejer, who propels the story and defines its emotional tone with Hitchcockian psychological twists and turns. A six-year-old child disappears and her parents fear the worst, then she suddenly returns home. A short while later, a teenaged girl is found murdered on a mountain path, her naked body thoughtfully covered with a jacket. The teenager's shocking death has unnerved all the residents, but there is an appalling paucity of clues for the inspector to work with on this puzzling case.

Charged with solving the murder in the picturesque setting below the Kollen Mountains, the gray-haired inspector Sejer pursues all leads, peeling away the façade of this idyllic village. Sejer is the backbone of the story, unobtrusive yet authoritative, skillfully unraveling the tragedy. The first suspect is the teenager's on-and-off again boyfriend, who has lived through a childhood so nightmarish that he barely survives, only to find himself first on the list of possible assailants. Next the inspector and his assistant, Jacob Skarre, interrogate the residents of each house on the street where the girl lived, gently probing into their routines, their familiarity with the deceased and their alibis for the time of the murder. Gradually the placid exterior of the village peels away, leaving a variety of dysfunctional households exposed along with an alarming number of plausible suspects.

The small Norwegian town that is the scene of the senseless murder is the same as Anywhere, USA, a simple, pastoral life surrounded by the beauty of nature. Inspector Sejer's talent lies in probing beneath the surface of everyday motives, where the average person is driven to intolerable limits; he understands the nature of evil, how rage and stupidity can overcome reason. Sifting through the most remote possibilities, his detective's instincts lead Sejer unerringly to the core of the mystery, compounding the tragedy of the young woman's death with profound injury to another victim of a blind system.

By turns more intricate, revealing and frightening, the story line is never predictable and often shocking. Mundane daily actions are suddenly suspect and one neighbor's inconsequential memory unlocks the whole chain of events. Certainly, Fossum has found her métier, structuring her characters with such deft strokes as to change innocence to threat in a heartbeat. The intricacies of human nature provide the grist for this tale, deep psychological chasms opened up by intolerable emotions that eventually explode into action. Inspector Sejer guides the uninitiated through a morass of possibilities, staring into the black heart of the criminal act that changes man to monster. Luan Gaines/2004.

I picked this up at an airport bookstore, of all places. I generally like Scandinavian detective novels, so when I saw it, I grabbed it. This was the first of the Sejer novels that I have come across and it was a pleasure to read. The dialogue is crisp and realistic, the characters are deftly sketched, and the prose is absolutely wonderful.

This particular book differs from some of the other Scandinavian mysteries in that the author seems more interested in character and psychology than in contemporary events and social issues. In some odd way, this reminded me of some of Ross McDonald's Lew Archer mysteries, in that much of the book is really about the detective uncovering hidden connections among a group of seemingly unrelated people, and eventually tying the case to a buried secret from the past. The pacing accordingly is relatively slow, with much of the action consisting of Sejer interviewing and reinterviewing the villagers to uncover the web of connections between them.

In terms of Scandinavian mysteries, this represents an interesting contrast with Mankell, Tursten, and the earlier Sjowall and Wahloo, whose books tended to be very topical, with crimes straight out of the headlines today, and with frequent asides from the main characters that tie the developments in the story to larger social issues. Those are all fine books as well, of course, just in a different vein.

Because of the emphasis on character and psychology over current events and social critique, I suspect that this book will age better than Mankell's and some of the others. As with the Lew Archer mysteries, this is fairly self-contained, and there isn't much that ties it to a particular time. It could have taken place 30 years ago, or yesterday, or 30 years from now.

This is a fine book and I look forward to reading the other Sejer mysteries.

This novel, set in Norway, is not so much a mystery as an exploration by an experienced and compassionate policeman of the sad and curious things that darken and unravel human lives. The book suggests that the joys and beauties of life are balanced, or even over-balanced, by the things fate throws at us which crush us. We come to know the inhabitants of the little rural village where the major events of the plot take place very well, and we come to grieve for them. While the book is more character- than plot-driven, there are two twists--one in the beginning which surprises, and one at the end which chills--which are the equal of any.

I wasn't aware of the work of Ms. Fossum--reminiscent of the Martin Beck novels--but I now look forward eagerly to reading more.

Very enjoyable, sober Norwegian procedural. No pyrotechnics. Beautiful, athletic 15 year old Annie is found dead on a beach surrounded by woods. There are a few feasible suspects in a very small town. Not uncommonly, there are some unlikely scenes (particularly one near the end involving the boyfriend) but few books don't have those. Few lives don't have those. Definitely worth the read but not if you're looking for a rush. I was looking for an antidote to a sugar rush from a recent novel and this was perfect. Nothing loopy, as I said, quite sober. One very bad thing about the book, the very last scene. The author tries to come full circle in the last few sentences with an ominous, unlikely and unneccesary cliffhanger that falls very flat - like an off color joke in the wrong crowd. I must have looked like I sucked on a lime after reading it as my eyes rolled toward the top of my head and into my brain - in disbelief and denial, trying to make sense of her decision to end the book like that. So I read the ending again. Yop, that's what she's doing.... At least she saved the sour note for last and I would recommend Don't Look Back regardless.

Don't Look Back, the first of Norwegian author Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer novels to appear in the U.S., is a realistic police procedural that reminds the reader that identifying a murderer as often as not comes down to luck and sheer chance as it does to good detective work. Fossum sets her story in the kind of small town neighborhood where everyone believes that he knows everything about all of his neighbors. But, of course, that is never the case, and this psychological suspense novel is filled with well-developed characters who are living whole lives that are unsuspected by those living just a few feet from them.

When Sejer and his partner were called to the village to investigate the disappearance of a little girl, he was realistic enough to expect the worst. What he did not expect, however, was that the mystery of what happened to this child would lead him to the body of one of the little girl's teenage neighbors, Annie Holland, a beautiful and well-liked 15-year old athlete admired by everyone who knew her.

The delicate, almost protective, way that Annie's nude body was left at the scene of her murder convinced Sejer that sex had nothing to do with the reason that she was killed. He sensed that her killer was someone who knew her well and, through repeated conversations with the townspeople, he pushed and poked at them in a patient effort to piece together the last few months of Annie's life in a way that would make it easier to identify the person who had wanted her dead. In the process, Sejer hoped that he would either piece together enough of Annie's story to allow him to make an arrest or that the killer would do something foolish because of all the pressure that he was applying to the townspeople. It was only a question of which would happen first.

Don't Look Back offers numerous insights into contemporary Norwegian society and proves again what an excellent writer of psychological suspense Karin Fossum is. Fans of writers like Ruth Rendell and John Harvey would do themselves a favor by adding her Inspector Sejer series to their list of "must reads."

It's a small village in Norway, and perhaps its most accomplished and beautiful high school girl is found dead. On close inspection of the days and weeks immediately preceding the tragedy, Inspector Sejer discovers that the victim's personality changed in a way quite noticeable to her family and friends. What happened to make her behavior change so much, and who knows but isn't telling?

Fossum has created a simple yet compelling tale about real human weakness leading to horrible consequences. Perhaps, the author suggests, murder lurks very closely under the consciousness of some individuals--and one accident or tragedy can bring a violent personality to the surface. It is difficult to critique Ms. Fossum's writing style, as the excellent translation by Felicity David makes such analysis unimportant. The characters are quite real, although Inspector Sejer is very very similar to Morse, Wallander, and several other Inspectors an avid police-procedural reader knows well and loves. Also, Sejer's multitalented junior partner reminds me vividly of Sgt. Lewis.

Nevertheless, this is a very engaging and thoughtful suspense novel that explores deep family-oriented themes. One of my biggest criticisms of murder-mystery novels is the fact that so many authors fail to describe a credible motive and background to make the criminal's actions believable. Such is not the case for Don't Look Back. This is a solid, well paced mystery, and most readers will be glad more Inspector Sejer mysteries are being translated into English for our grateful consumption.