Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Private Detective Varg Veum takes on the case of finding the missing sister of a high-flying lawyer. A simple task, until links emerge to a ship carrying an unknown, but likely illegal, cargo towards the Norwegian coast and a double suicide involving one of the lawyer’s parents. Dogged by powerful interests who will go to any length to hinder his investigation, Veum is in a race against time to prevent history repeating itself.
This is a suitably dark slice of Nordic noir that utilizes one of the favourite tropes of the private eye novel, the missing persons case that is anything but open and shut. Adding to it a contemporary twist with themes involving people smuggling and environmental crime that are even more pertinent now than when the book was first published in 2002.
The tone is sombre and Veum is a suitably down at heel protagonist, world weary and with a wry one liner for most occasions. All literary private eyes owe a debt to Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, the best wear it lightly rather than have it hanging around their neck like a horse collar. Staalesen and Veum wear it like a feather boa, something that reminds the reader of the lineage, but not as a weight that holds either back.
He writes brilliantly about the hypocrisies that exist just beneath the polished surface of a, supposedly, liberal society. Money still talks and ends often justify means when reputations are at stake.
If the subsequent books in the series currently in translation meet the standard of this first outing Gunnar Staalesen could be the biggest thing to come out of the North since the Vikings.
Number 11 in the Varg Veum series
