[ATDrake]

Finished The Last Pilgrim by Norwegian author Gard Sveen, 1st in his Tommy Bergmann series which I got as an AmazonCrossing pricedrop a while ago. According to the author bio-blurb in the back, this was a debut novel which netted him a hat trick of the Glass Key, Riverton Prize, and Maurits Hansen Award, putting him one up on fellow Norwegian Jo Nesbø, who got the Glass Key and Riverton for the debut of his Harry Hole* series.

This was one of those cases where the discovery of a long-dead body sparks an investigation which is as much about figuring out what was really going on back then from the reader POV as well as whodunnit from the sleuth POV. For a while, I thought it was really going to be a dual investigation case, with a sleuth in the past and a sleuth in the present each tackling related murders, which would have been pretty cool and I still hope to read one day, but it took a different approach which was nearly as interesting.

Even if it did revolve around a rather common plotline of WWII resistance/collaborator/embarrassing government secrets in occupied European countries coming to light and sparking a hasty panic cover-up and/or bonus murder chain, which I think I've seen in like, 3/4s of the cases where a sleuth has to investigate a decades-old body discovery/disappearance. Not just in European crime novels, but also visiting Americans from series like Gideon Oliver and the Faith Fairchild cozies.

Oh well, when in doubt, blame the Nazis. They're probably responsible for it in some manner anyway.

There was some clunkiness in the flow of the writing in some places (a tendency to play over-coy with pronouns instead of names when trying to hide something from the reader without really hiding it), and a lot of suspiciously specific twistiness which seemed to be set up in order that you were probably supposed to think that certain characters could have been other characters playing the same or similar roles in the plot. But the major reveals were all ultimately plausibly hinted at in advance, so while some turns were unexpected, you could see how the characters involved might have been moved to act in that way under the circumstances.

Medium-high recommend for a standard story given interesting and unusual twists (probably not if you're sensitive about bad things happening to pets or children, though) in a manner that keeps you reading by overturning your expectations about what initially seemed to have probably happened in order to find out what was really going on. I liked this one more than I thought I would going in, what with the mildly overused setup, and it certainly gave me value for money in terms of wordcount, at 7000 Kindle locations. I'm pleased that AmazonCrossing has already translated the 2nd novel (even if it looks to be an even more cliché plotline of crazed sadistic psychosexual serial killer who targets vulnerable young women, sigh), and hope they plan on getting the 3rd.

* Bergmann does seem rather Harry Hole-alike, what with his deep personal dysfunction, substance addiction, and tendency to go off on unofficially approved investigation tangent which nevertheless gets results. I'm reminded of Jørn Lier Horst's remark about how “being fed up with all the drunkards who solve crimes in Norwegian literature” led him to start writing his own successful Scandicrime novels with blackjack! and hookers!, with a reasonably well-adjusted mostly by-the-book team player career cop, even if Bergmann smokes rather than drinks to the level of borderline alcoholism.