[ATDrake]

Finished The Hunting Dogs by Jørn Lier Horst, 8th in his William Wisting, Laid-Back Non-Drunkard Norwegian Crime Solver, series. This was a pretty interesting installment, with a little more action thriller in it than previous ones, what with someone having to plan a heist to break into their own office and a suspect surveillance chase and all. The premise of this one was quite good, with an accusation of mishandling evidence in an old abduction-turned-murder case in order to secure a conviction coming back to haunt Wisting and the police department, resulting in his suspension from the force until the matter is cleared, leaving him unable to officially investigate either this, or the other cases which pop up.

In a nice touch, it's not simply a matter of having doubt cast on the integrity of the police having potentially put away an innocent person, but apparently actual tampering, opening up questions in Wisting's mind as to what sort of justice can truly be gotten if the justice-dispensers themselves act injustly, and how far he can trust not only his fellow colleagues, but also himself, to uphold the law, and re-examining his own methods and approaches towards improvement, now having experienced what it was like to be on the other side of the investigative procedure. In the meantime, there's a new missing persons case which Wisting is very frustrated about not being able to help out with due to his suspension, as he becomes excluded from the usual police resources (officially, at least, though he still has a network of willing-to-help old colleagues he can contact), and to avoid conflict-of-interest, his crime journalist daughter Line is looking into another case, involving the random murder of a pedestrian into which she has become part of the story, having confronted the masked probable-murderer at the victim's house after having tracked down the latter's identity in the course of her reporting, rather than covering her father's situation, as the rest of her paper is doing.

As a result, there's an interesting examination of the synergy between the media's crime coverage and the police investigations, with questions raised about how far the media's need for fresh news about investigative developments and finding things to print to attract the public's attention can go to feed and affect a crime, as Wisting's accuser manipulates the coverage by dropping selective tidbits, Line resorts to rather sneaky tactics to obtain unreleased information for her story, and Wisting himself looks back at how the media's need for a scoop and the pressure on the police to provide results may have sealed the original victim's fate once the knowledge of an important piece of evidence was leaked and also once having been set on the path of a promising suspect, both the press and the police vision can become narrow, blinkered, and biased, preferring to focus on finding confirmation for the case rather than looking for evidence that might disprove it. (And we also find out the hierarchy for importance-to-the-Norwegian-paper-reading-public of potential murder victims when Line goes to initially cover her then-unknown case and is evaluating whether she can get a sensational enough story to knock her father's case off the front page and spare him a little of the media firestorm for a while: young women = best; celebrities = almost as good, but too rare to be relied upon; old men = not so good; old men with dogs = better, since there are a lot of dog lovers among the Gentle Readers, especially if they can get a good picture of the dog.)

Highly recommended. This one is the first of the Wisting novels to start accumulating the major-ish subgenre prizes, and managed to snag three of them (Norway's Riverton for best in country, Scandinavia's Glass Key for best Nordic overall, and Sweden's Martin Beck for best in translation), which, IMHO, were well-deserved. Some of the dénouement and ending of this felt a little pat, considering that I managed to guess who was really behind some of the things (it was kind of obvious that it was that sort of person who would be doing it) and there was a tidy wrap-up to the cases, but important ethical questions are raised and examined and not laid aside simply because closure was provided for all the crimes.