Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
There is a Bast compilation available: Bell, Book and Murder. It contains all three of the Bast novels. It's sitting on my Kindle, but I haven't gotten to it yet. |
Cool; glad to know that they're still available, thanks! Though they're not my favourites among Edghill's books, I recall them being fairly entertaining and enjoyable reads that were both rather matter-of-fact and wryly humorous about the foibles of the New Age/neopagan communities.
Finished
Dregs and
Closed for Winter by award-winning Norwegian author
Jørn Lier Horst, who, in writing about one Chief Inspector William Wisting in Larvik, is apparently writing what he knows, having himself been a Chief Inspector in Larvik before retiring to become a full-time writer. Actually, it's not so much a thinly-veiled author avatar as it might seem, since apparently one of the the main inspirations for Wisting's character is the author quote-unquote "
being fed up with all the drunkards who solve crimes in Norwegian literature". Some of them have been very entertaining drunkards, but he's definitely got a point about how their sort of typical dramatic personally dysfunctional yet professionally brilliant emotionally repressed self-medicating lone wolf cowboy hero acting on hunches against the rest of the department and confronting the culprit with no backup tactics don't tend to get particularly usable results outside of thrillers.
With that in mind, Wisting is a more balanced sort of middle-aged crime solver. He works to strengthen his relationships with his daughter and his girlfriend and depends on their emotional support even as he tries to reciprocate for their own concerns, has to take name-brand pharmaceuticals for his health problems and not just down whatever's in the nearest available bottle, goes on leaves of absences when the stress starts causing nervous breakdowns instead of using his indomitable will to soldier through, relies on the evidence gathered by the investigators and forensic examinations and establishing good communications with witnesses and suspects and listening to feedback from his colleagues to piece together the solutions as a team, holds strong opinions about certain things which he's willing to admit aren't necessarily the best ones to act upon, and is generally more ordinary than exceptional or exceptionalist, aside from being the obligatory sleuthing success. I find I like this for a change of pace, though I should note that Horst is not at all averse to adding thrilling suspect chases and nick-of-time dramatic last-minute saves.
I also like the secondary POV provided by Wisting's daughter Line, who works as a crime journalist, sometimes co-operatively, and other times at cross-purposes with Wisting and the police department's interests, and provides a useful counterpoint to all the policing, showing the impact that the reporting of crime and ensuing public trust in the authority and reliability, or otherwise, of the police has. In this, the books so far are a little similar to also-Norwegian Thomas Enger's Henning Juul books starring a crime reporter sleuth, although somewhat less cynical about the media and the public. Although both series seem to come to the same conclusions as to what's most important to the Norwegian public, as determined in
Closed for Winter: money, sex, and power. All that's missing from that tagline is the elephants for it to be a Bujoldian Vorkosiverse quote. (Come to think of it, Wisting would make a pretty good ImpSec analyst.)
These are the 6th and 7th books in the series, which happened to be the first few available in English translations, and reading
Dregs felt weirdly familiar, since it was centred on the discovery of mysterious severed feet floating ashore, which is something
that's been happening for ages off the coast here, and as it turns out, the author was inspired by our cases, which hopefully seem to be just from missing people who ended up in the water and not escapees from a lurking murder victim underwater corpse-dumping ground.
Closed for Winter also has a bit of international inspiration, in terms of addressing the poverty and lack of non-criminal economic opportunities in Eastern Europe, which is handled with rather more sympathy than one would normally expect from an ex-police officer author, just as the subplot about the usefulness of criminal punishment rather than rehabilitation in
Dregs and its difficult effects upon prisoners who've served their sentences and are attempting to reintegrate into society is, making for a nicely nuanced take on various issues.
One of things I rather like about these is the lack (thus far) of what seemed to be the obligatory prologue or interlude that a lot of the available Scandicrime novels have, where there's a scene which takes place from the killer's POV, showing just how depraved or clever they think they are and what they're doing so the Gentle Reader can follow along with the developments at home and see how the sleuth is getting cleverly misdirected or whatever. All the action so far takes place only from Wisting and Line's POVs, and all that they know or notice are all the clues that we're given access to, so we have to piece things together with nearly the same limitations that they have (allowing for the fact that we see things from Line's POV that Wisting isn't privy to yet and vice versa), making these fall more on the mystery side of the fence, with cases you can try to solve yourself instead of just kind of suspiciously guessing which one of the cast is the secretly crazed psycho-sexual serial killer in disguise based on clues dropped in their villain monologue. This, too, is a nice change of pace.
Medium-high recommend; I really liked these, but it's only two books in so far (although judging from the awards listings, they just keep getting better). This is a lower-key, slower-paced, more investigative procedurally-oriented series than a lot of the popular Nordic Noir ones, but it's very good indeed, if those elements are the kinds of things which appeal to you, with writing that tends to question default assumptions about crime and criminals and is empathetic about (some) conditions that might influence people to turn to non-violent crime while not allowing justification of murder.
As of #7, there's a useful introductory write-up about the character of Wisting and the setting of Larvik, and his current personal and professional situations at the front of each book, which bring you up to date on the important developments thus far in the series (no spoilers for previous cases). Currently, #6 seems to be offered at a regular 1st-in-series introductory lower price that drops to a pretty good deal if you've got the good coupons at Kobo, and #7 and #9 (which just won the 2016 Petrona Award) are on sale in the UK for just £1.99 each, which is certainly worth it to give a try if it's the sort of thing you think you might like.