Not long ago I heaped high praise on Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s police novel, Don’t Look Back. I’m sorry to say that the book I read as a follow-up, The Water’s Edge, did not live up to my expectations.

In this book, Inspector Sejer, a police detective in a town in the Oslo area, along with his assistant, Skarre, investigate the rape and murder of a small boy, found dead in a wooded area near a lake.

What makes this novel bad (in my view), and bad in a particularly Norwegian way, is what I might call the author’s considerateness. She’s considerate of everyone—victims, grieving parents, pedophiles, and policemen. She goes into everyone’s thoughts and lets them make their own cases. I approve of this to an extent—I like a villain to be three-dimensional—as long as the author remembers which side he or she is on. Fossum is willing to condemn murder, of course, but when a pedophile character complains that society just hasn’t advanced enough to embrace his particular philia, as it is now embracing homosexuality, no really strong counterargument is given. (Or so it seemed to me.) This injects a genuine creepiness into the whole enterprise.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that Fossum seems to have lost control of her characters. Sejer and Skarre, who came off as well-realized personalities in Don’t Look Back, have gotten all muddled. In their conversations, they seem to switch attitudes toward the legal system back and forth for no discernible reason.

And over all stands the fact (in which the policemen seem to take some pride) that Norway isn’t barbaric like the United States, and compassionately puts all criminals, even child murderers, back on the streets after a maximum of 21 years.

The point of it all would appear to be that we’re all equally guilty, but some of us have better luck than others. I accept that theologically (to an extent; I believe in degrees of guilt and sanctification), but in terms of the law it frankly offends me.

So consider my endorsement of Karin Fossum’s work withdrawn for the time being.

“It’s a legend, a story from the old days. If you’re out rowing and hear a splashing sound behind your boat, that’s the sea serpent rising up from the depths. You should never look back, just be careful to keep on rowing. If you pretend to ignore it and leave it in peace, everything will be fine, but if you look back into its eyes, it will pull you down into the great darkness. According to legend, it has red eyes.”

As you’re all aware, I’m very old and very wise, and therefore rarely surprised. If you’ve been following my reviews, you’ll know that although I’ve sampled several Scandinavian mystery writers (the genre has suddenly taken off in the backwash of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy), I’ve mostly not been overwhelmed with them. Too polite, too depressing, too politically correct, and usually not well translated. But when Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back showed up cheap for Kindle one day, I took a chance.

I was surprised.

This is a very good book (and the translation is one of the best I’ve seen). In my experience, female authors generally have trouble writing good male characters, but for my money Fossum nailed this one.

She grabs the reader by the short hairs from the very beginning. The novel starts with one of those police situations which anyone with a touch of human feeling has to follow with fascination and a cold clutch of fear at his heart. I won’t tell you how that turns out, but it actually leads into the real central mystery of the novel, the discovery of a dead, fourteen-year-old girl, lying naked and almost unmarked next to a mountain tarn, an isolated body of water which, according to legend, is home to a sea serpent.

Fossum’s hero is Inspector Konrad Sejer (his last name is Norwegian for “Victor”), an aging, empathetic city police detective who lives alone with his dog and mourns his late wife. As he gets to know the victim’s parents, her friends and their families, and her boyfriend, he uncovers one secret after another. There are plenty of motives and plenty of suspects, and plenty of unhappiness to go around in the small mountain town that is the story’s scene. The dead girl will not be the last person to get hurt.

Although religious questions aren’t central (Sejer is agnostic, as is almost everyone in the story—which accurately reflects Norwegian life) it’s interesting that Fossum makes Sejer’s partner, Jakob Skarre, a believer of some kind. His gentle explanation of his faith to his superior, dropped in passing, seemed kind of wishy-washy to me theologically, but (in my opinion) added depth to the whole story.

I’ve already purchased another Inspector Sejer book. Highly recommended, with cautions for language and adult themes.

There’s a rather pathetic sub-group among mystery fans (I’m part of it) that’s always on the lookout, without much hope, for the author who will truly fill the shoes of John D. MacDonald and his private eye, Travis McGee. Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford comes the closest so far, in my view, but he doesn’t quite hit the mark.

When I started Tom Lowe’s A False Dawn, I thought I’d found the successor at last. For a few chapters. Then it kind of fell apart, but that first impression was strong enough to give me hopes for this author.

Sean O’Brien resembles Travis McGee in his Florida east coast location (on the St. John’s River in this case), and in living—at least part of the time—on a boat. Also in his relations with his neighbors at the marina. But the great resonance is found in Sean’s narration, in his wry and world-weary decency.

Sean is a retired Miami police detective. He left the job after his wife died of cancer, and devotes himself to restoring his house and his boat. Also to looking after his dog, a dachshund named Max. He has no intention of interfering with police matters until he discovers a dying girl lying on a river bank. She expires in his arms, speaking words in a language he doesn’t know.

Although two of the cops who come to investigate seem decent and competent, one of them appears determined to pin the girl’s murder on Sean. Sean’s desire to clear himself, as well as a feeling of obligation to the dead girl, impels him to put his own detective expertise to work, leading him to discover a festering swamp of human smuggling, sex trafficking, and political corruption.

Although Sean O’Brien has the makings of a great character, in my opinion, he didn’t impress me so much as this story went on. His penchant for walking, eyes wide open, into ridiculously dangerous situations struck me as simply self-destructive. And frankly, I’m tired of stories (SPOILER HERE) where wealthy industrialists turn out to serial killers. How many millionaire serial killers have there been in real life? How many have you encountered in novels, movies, and TV shows? The final showdown didn’t work well for me either. I found it far-fetched.

There’s an element of mysticism in this book which I’m not sure how to take. A spiritualist makes a prediction which comes true, but Sean has nothing good to say about her and seems to find her occult practices repellant. There’s also a mysterious Native American character, who may or may not be a ghost. At one point, at a grave, Sean makes the sign of the cross.

All in all, I give A False Dawn a mixed review. Still, on the basis of the strong opening, I think I might be willing to give Tom Lowe another chance. I think he has the potential to become a strong and successful detective writer.

Cautions of language, violence, and sexual situations.

Badge of Evil is chiefly memorable as the source text for Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil. It’s a competent mystery/thriller, written in the 1950s in a style that would be considered pretty languid today.

The film writers made a number of changes in the basic story, written by “Whit Masterson,” a pseudonym for the creative team of Wade Miller and William Daemer. In the movie, Charlton Heston played Miguel Vargas, a Mexican drug enforcement officer, married to an American woman played by Janet Leigh. This was a reversal from the book, whose hero was Michael Holt, an assistant district attorney in an unnamed California city, married to a woman of Mexican heritage.

In the book, Michael is assigned to assist in the prosecution of an heiress and her fiance, charged with the dynamite murder of her father. Michael is unsatisfied with the detectives’ case, and his own digging soon uncovers a different suspect who immediately confesses.

Michael becomes suspicious of the two detectives—heroes in the city—and begins to research other cases they’ve “closed,” to see if they’ve planted evidence before. Before long both he and his wife are under attack.

For a contemporary reader, there’s not a lot of punch here. The idea of corrupt cops who plant evidence was shocking in the 1950s, but has become a cliché in today’s fiction. Also, a district attorney with these kinds of suspicions would get a lot more support from a police department nowadays.

I was intrigued by the portrayal of Michael’s marriage. The authors make a special point of noting that Michael’s co-workers joke about his wife being jealous of his career, but in fact she’s extremely supportive. Michael’s marriage is portrayed as a genuine partnership, and his wife as a good friend as well as a lover. It strikes me that a modern writers would have given her her own career, and would have also ramped up the conflict between the spouses. What does that say about marriage, then and now?

Badge of Evil should be approached as an artifact of its time, and the reader had best not bring contemporary expectations to it. I found the prose a little flaccid, and the action a little tame, but that’s probably typical of the style of the times. Suitable for most readers, teens and up.

Minnesota thriller and mystery writers, as you’ve probably noticed, almost always get at least one shot with me. Douglas Dorow is a Minneapolis writer (I’ve never met him, but then I’ve never met almost everybody), and I have a suspicion (based on hints in this book) that he’s a Christian. He’s written a promising, if not stellar, thriller in The Ninth District, and I think it will go over well with most of this blog’s audience.

The title refers to the Ninth District of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is located in Minneapolis. The story begins with the murder of a bank teller in suburban Wayzata. FBI agent Jack Miller, along with his junior partner Ross Fruen, are investigating it as one of a string of bank robberies in the Twin Cities area, committed by a gunman they call the Governor (because he wears a mask that looks like one of our former governors—Jesse Ventura, one assumes). The stakes are raised as they gradually come to realize that they’re facing a very clever, entirely ruthless criminal who has a much bigger score in mind than a few bank jobs.

I think Douglas Dorow has the makings of a first-class thriller writer, but he hasn’t yet mastered plotting. Although he ramps up the danger at regular intervals, as the genre demands, he makes the common mistake (I understand it well and am probably guilty of it myself) of not going full out for the climax. A master writer would have put Jack’s family (the portrayal of the family and his strained but loving marriage is one of the book’s strengths) in peril at the end, but Dorow chooses to take them out of the action and concentrate on the showdown between Jack and the Governor. That’s understandable, but it lowers the tension.

Still, not a bad summer read. The values are good, and it’s suitable for teens and up. Well worth four bucks for the Kindle version.