"They're going to blame themselves for not knowing."

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	• Don't Look Back Karin Fossum Harvest Books, 2005 - 324 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"They're going to blame themselves for not knowing."

An Australian friend of mine recommended Karin Fossum in her blog, and I was delighted to give one of her novels a try. I have heard of her (usually mentioned in the same breath as Henning Mankell) but have never actually read one of her books.

Fossum is generally called the Queen of Norwegian Crime Fiction. Difficult for me to judge, not having read much crime fiction from Norway. Don't Look Back is the second in the Inspector Sejer series, and the first that was published in translation.

Short review: It's a pretty great book, particularly if you like police procedurals.

Longer remarks: The comparison to Mankell is fair, but I found that I missed something of the feel for place and culture that I find in his books. It may be that this is just the focus of Don't Look Back, or it may be that this is not Fossum's focus. I definitely enjoyed it enough to give another one of her books a try.

Recommended for fans of smart police procedurals. Bonus points if you are a fan of some of the other Scandinavian detective writers-- they have that particular glum and straightforward tone in common.

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Superb writing

Characters that are real, not forced or overdrawn. Plot development that is believable and deceiving, with a style that smoothly involves the reader mentally, laying clues that may be clues or not, always with unexpected plot finishes that are satisfying. Read one of her books and you immediately want to start another. A detective mystery writer of the highest order.
If you haven't read any Fossum I would recommend starting with The Indian Bride. The British TimesOnline named her one of the 50 greatest crime writers. If you like anything in this genre you will love this author.

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Looking back to solve a murder

By everyone's accounts, Annie Holland was a well-adjusted and responsible teen. A terrific athlete as well as the neighborhood's favorite baby-sitter, she mysteriously becomes withdrawn with no apparent provocation. She quits the handball team, and her boyfriend and parents can't quite understand what's behind the sudden transformation. Less than a year later, her dead body is discovered by a lake, her clothes piled beside her. Devoid of evidence that indicates struggle or rape, Chief Inspector Sejer is forced to dig into Annie's recent past and a neighboring family's tragedy to piece together the events of a November morning that deeply affected Annie and led to her death.

The first of Karin Fossum's Norwegian police procedurals to be translated into English, "Don't Look Back" is quite subdued when compared to its American counterparts. The focus here is on the characters and not so much the action. Although not very original, it is nonetheless realistic in its portrayal of police work as the plodding and rather repetitive activity that it often is. To wit, our patient but shrewd protagonist, Konrad Sejer, with his partner Det. Skarre, find themselves interviewing the same people several times and pounding the pavement to uncover the circumstances behind the teenager's murder.

"Don't Look Back" starts out slowly and the re-interviewing of suspects and potential witnesses does become dreary after awhile. However, the story is continually rejuvenated whenever the author shifts the focus on the character's back-stories. The characters are brought to life by moving accounts of children who've been abused, a chief inspector who's still grieving for his dead wife, and a desperate couple at the end of their tether with a difficult child. The last few chapters were quite exciting and the action does pick up considerably. I have to say, though, that as sympathetic a detective as Sejer is, he really is rather dull. For a franchise character, he does not possess the more stimulating and distinguishing attributes that fictional police detectives have such as Colin Dexter's snobbish Inspector Morse, Michael Connelly's confrontational Harry Bosch, or Henning Mankell's quick-tempered everyman Kurt Wallander.

The story's setting is a semi-rural village just outside of Oslo, but apart from the characters' and street names, there's really nothing here to distinguish it as uniquely Norwegian. There's also nothing that distinguishes Ms. Fossum's writing (or rather the translation of it). Not having read any of her books before, I was eager to discover an identifiable style that is uniquely hers. Unfortunately, if the Norwegian names were not used, it could have as easily been any other crime fiction in any other locale. It is quite good, though, as a mystery, and it did keep me guessing, not so much as to whodunit, but as to why. The ending, too, was rather creepy and unexpected, which to me is a positive. Overall, it was a worthwhile read, if not a wholly gripping and memorable one.

(For those interested, the story has been loosely adapted in an Italian film called "The Girl by the Lake," but be warned that almost every review of it has been disappointing.)

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Hidden Lives

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."

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"Dont Look Back"

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Don't Look Back heralds the arrival of an exotic new crime series featuring Inspector Sejer, a smart and enigmatic hero, tough but fair. The setting is a small, idyllic village at the foot of Norway's Kollen Mountain, where neighbors know neighbors and children play happily in the streets. But when the body of a teenage girl is found by the lake at the mountaintop, the town's tranquillity is shattered forever. Annie was strong, intelligent, and loved by everyone. What went so terribly wrong? Doggedly, yet subtly, Inspector Sejer uncovers layer upon layer of distrust and lies beneath the town's seemingly perfect facade.

Critically acclaimed across Europe, Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer novels are masterfully constructed, psychologically convincing, and compulsively readable, and are now available in the United States for the first time.

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