IN THE DARKNESS

Coming straight from another Scandinavian crime thriller I enjoyed, I approached In the Darkness with some excitement.

The cover of the book had a statement by Jo Nesbo proclaiming Karin Fossum as “A truly great writer” and as a huge fan of Nesbo I guessed he knew what he was talking about. In all fairness In the Darkness is not an awful book but it isn’t very good. The story isn’t implausible and I warmed to Inspector Sejer very quickly. Unfortunately most of the book was taken up with Eva Magnus, an artist who, as the book goes on, seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Magnus is, in my opinion, not a character I am going to root for. She seems moody, isn’t particularly nice about her daughter and seems to be quite self-obsessed. This was my first experience of Inspector Sejer and it will not be my last as long as there is more of him in the novel. This is the problem I had with the book: not enough of what I found to be the only interesting character and a bit too much of a character that seemed to mope around quite a lot.

I understand that Fossum is a very popular writer in Norway but this book does her no favours, the pace for the first half seems almost stationary , the second half (especially the last twenty pages) seemed to rush around tying up loose ends.  All in all an unsatisfactory read?what a shame.