Rating: 3.5* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Don't Look Back heralds the arrival of an exotic new crime series featuring Inspector Sejer, a smart and enigmatic hero, tough but fair. The setting is a small, idyllic village at the foot of Norway's Kollen Mountain, where neighbors know neighbors and children play happily in the streets. But when the body of a teenage girl is found by the lake at the mountaintop, the town's tranquility is shattered forever. Annie was strong, intelligent, and loved by everyone. What went so terribly wrong? Doggedly, yet subtly, Inspector Sejer uncovers layer upon layer of distrust and lies beneath the town's seemingly perfect facade.Critically acclaimed across Europe, Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer novels are masterfully constructed, psychologically convincing, and compulsively readable, and are now available in the United States for the first time.My Review: Herein we're introduced to Inspector Konrad Sejer, homicide detective in a Norwegian city, as he solves the murder of the popular, universally beloved young athlete and all-around good girl Annie Holland. Sejer can't crack the shell of acclaim and plaudits that surround the dead girl. No one, and I mean NO ONE, will admit that she was anything but beautiful and perfectly kind. Well, no one except her slow-top sexpot older sister...make that half-sister...who finally, in an unedited moment, admits that she found Annie a bit snide at times. No one else, from her horrible harpy of a mother to her convicted rapist of a sports coach to the neighbor whose dead toddler she was the only one who could handle, will give Sejer the way in to her life that he needs to discover her killer.Since this is a mystery, not real life, Sejer and his newly minted partner Jacob Skarre do find the way in, and the killer is brought to justice barely in time to prevent a third needless death. Along the way, as really happens when police start turning over rocks in the search for evidence, lives are altered, lives are ruined, and even lost; in the end, does the guilt of the murderer being proved make up for the pace of destruction left in the wake of the search? Fossum provides no answer, or does she pretend that it's even of more than passing concern for her characters.I began this book excited, if a little reluctant; I am always conflicted when starting a series of mysteries. It's nice to know that there are a few more pleasures to be had with an agreeable set of characters; my orderly side likes to know that justice will be served; but then, well, then there's that oppressive sense that *yet*more*books* have landed on the pile of material that, should I live to be 150, will never disappear, or even appreciably diminish. That feels a little depressing to me, to have a task (however much I love the task, and I do) that simply cannot be finished. Sort of like laundry, a Sisyphean labor of impossibly distant closure. (Unless you launder naked and don't put on clothes until you go outside your house, everything is always a little dirty, and therefore always laundry. It's just depressing.)And then the trouble set in. We have dead children, never ever a favorite theme of mine. We have violent men, never ever a favorite theme of mine. We have a grouchy, isolated older detective, kind of overused. But then we have Norway as our backdrop, fresh and new to me. We have prose that, in English translation, feels immediate and grippingly suspenseful. We have characters limned against a bright background in sharp, dark strokes, like reverse film noir...hard to do, and done well here. But on balance, I really don't feel four-starry about the book. I'll read more, of course. I'll even enjoy them, provided we don't have more dead children. But the bright bloom of excitement dimmed a bit, as I suppose was inevitable, and it seems to me that it needn't have. Other choices could have been made. But they weren't, and so here I am, only pleased, not overwhelmed.Welcome to life as an adult, I suppose. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I bought this book on sale for the Kindle back when it seemed like Norwegian crime fiction was a thing. Is it still a thing? I don't know, but it was a thing, right? Anyway, I thought it was a thing and so I bought this and in retrospect a silly number of other Karin Fossum books when they were on sale, and I remember thinking, "Boy, I hope these don't suck," as I clicked through and kept buying. Click. Click. Click.I'm reading 52 books in 52 weeks for 2013, and I've weighted my reading list toward crime fiction and so I thought this would be a good one to work in early on: because if I liked Karin Fossum's books, I'd have something to look forward to when the next one came up on the list a month or so later. Alternately, if I didn't like, I'd have time to swap out the other books for something I would like.Fortunately, I quite liked Don't Look Back. In fact, I can probably say I loved it. I mean, was I eager to dive back into the book whenever I had a free moment? I was. Did I feel affection toward the main characters? I did. Did I get that delicious aching tension that happens approximately two-thirds of the way through a book you're really enjoying, where you're torn between ripping through the remaining pages because you really want to know what will happen and lingering on each page so you can stay in the world of the book? I got that. So, yeah, let's say I loved Don't Look Back and give me another month or three to figure out if I'm not just flush with the pleasure of reading a very good book or not.The review. Did you want the review? I guess that's what we do here, right? Give you the synopsis, the opinion, the telling detail, the almost-too-apt closing line?Well, even if so, I'm going to skip the synopsis and you'll thank me for it later. Let's just say a police detective and his partner are investigating a crime in a small Norwegian town. Everyone in the town knows one another, has opinions about one another in their own semi-taciturn way. As the pair investigate, the omniscient narrator moves easily from the inside of one person's head to the next with a stylistic confidence I found exciting. (Fossum has more than one chapter start inside the head of a villager and then, as soon as the policemen are on the scene, she leaps right inside their POV.) But once in their heads, Fossum hangs about not to plant clues for the reader but to illuminate the delicate processes of grief, loss, and shock. In a way, the book is about the reverberations left in the wake of death. A glib elevator pitch for Don't Look Back might be: it's like if Ross MacDonald had written a novelization of the Twin Peaks pilot. Even if that allows you to guess at the contours of the plot and perhaps a certain amount of the theme, it doesn't give Fossum her due. Her work seduces you with its understated empathy for every character in the book. Even as much as I came to enjoy the interplay between kindly Inspector Sejer and his young assistant Skarre, you feel Fossum has no more affection for them than she does for all the other characters. That seems to me to be a rarity in the field of mystery fiction, where the investigator has an MVP status among the writer or (if it becomes a series) the readers, or both. Although such maturity and poise is to be appreciated in its own right, it actually helps heighten the themes of Don't Look Back: because no character is too slight, no death goes unfelt...even as its aftershocks are impossible to predict. Don't Look Back is an enjoyable, touching, thoughtful read. I can't wait to get to the next.
What do You think about Don't Look Back (2005)?
The story begins when a little girl named Ragnhild who has disappeared from her village and no one knows where she is. She was going home when a man picked her up in his van and said that he would take her where she needed to go. Obviously, this is terrifying and you hope for the best. Ragnhild is brought back to this man’s house and after a while she pleads with the man to take her home. Eventually, he agrees and he leaves her by her parents house. Inspector Sejer has already gotten involved in the case and he is questioning people along with his partner. Once the girl returns home, every one is relieved until Ragnhild makes a startling confession. She saw a dead body with this man in the woods. This is where the story, Don’t Look Back begins, as Sejer along with his team go out to the woods to see the woman who has died. Her name is Annie and she is a student. There are a multitude of suspects and it’s up to Sejer to solve the mystery. To me, it didn’t make much sense to start the story with the disappearance of Ragnhild. For a book that was 421 pages, having what seemed like 30 or 40 pages to begin with on this story which has nothing to do with the murder seems bizarre. Yes, children can disappear and this is scary but why bother putting it at the beginning of a mystery that will have nothing to do with the rest of the story seems more like a waste of pages if anything. Just start the mystery with Ragnhild seeing a body would make more sense to me. As far as the rest of the book is concerned, much of it is a dry police procedural with Sejer and his partner questioning suspects. The point of view switches back to the minds of the suspects as well, which again, makes the story drag on. The story seemed to go on forever for me at times, as if each chapter was at least 50 pages, if not more. The story takes place in a rural village outside of Oslo, but unlike novels by my favorite writer, Camilla Lackberg, there wasn’t much of a feeling that this takes place in Norway. Yes, this was a poor village and one of the people who was questioned mentioned that some children spent most of their lives weaving baskets until their fingers were worn out. That only made the book more depressing for me. Aa a result, most of the novel lacked any real suspense for me. Since the viewpoints were going back and fourth between Sejer and the suspects, this put an interesting twist on the last 50 pages of the novel as the killer was revealed. You could say that it was a dark twist but in detective novels, I prefer that someone like Sejer has all the answers like DCI Banks or other great detectives. In some ways, you could say that these characters were broken, making this more of a psychological thriller. The problem here was that you needed more of a story other then a detective questioning suspects. Again, if you were to compare this to Lackberg, you would find that she creates a story that is more character driven with a great ending. Not a great novel but not a bad one either. I understand that this book is loosely based on an Italian film, The Girl By The Lake. That movie didn’t get good reviews. While there were a lot of good reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, I can’t follow them and will give this book three stars.
—Ron Hummer
Inspector Konrad Sejer is unyielding and determined in his pursuit of truth. He can be tough but he is not strident. His MO includes considering other people's feelings. He is a likable sleuth. A widower, he cherishes the memories of his wife. He loves his grandson and he pampers his dog. He doesn't sleep around or go on alcoholic binges. He doesn't abuse or belittle those below him in the chain of command.In this book by Karin Fossum, Sejer pursues the killer of a beautiful young woman who was known to be smart, caring, orderly, conscientious, devoted and athletic. But his investigation reveals that something had changed her habits and outlook some months before her dead body was discovered naked by the side of a lake. What was it that changed her? And, had she, whom everybody in her small community seemed to like, met with tragedy because her trusting nature had allowed someone she knew to silence her forever?This mystery is remarkable for its sustained tension. The narrative consists mostly of investigative dialogue rather than dramatic action. The language style is simple but has emotional and psychological depth. There are almost no lags or pauses in how the author has Sejer, and his young assistant Skarre, build layer after layer of informational evidence, much of which may seem incidental and unrelated to discovering the perpetrator or a motive but which nevertheless holds the reader's attention page after page. The ending is shocking but credible. Most mystery fans would agree that Fossum is one of the best new writers in the genre.
—Sverre
Every now and then I try out a police procedural hoping to understand why they are as popular as they are. I usually end up disappointed. Fossum's Don't Look Back doesn't break that trend. This particular book is especially "procedural". There's a mystery of sorts but sorting everything out just requires talking to a bunch of people a couple of times. I suppose that's what makes the genre "procedural". They go through the motions of interviewing suspects, then reinterviewing suspects, until they've got some sort of timeline.My biggest complaint is the lackluster characters. Sejer seems to provide little more than a focus for the camera. What's his "character"? "Widower with a dog." That largely sums him up. None of the minor characters are handled any better. "Overbearing housewife". "Man-crazy young woman". Etc. The only interesting character is the journeyman policeman Skarre. And even there we only see the barest glimpses of a personality -- how happy he is to be called by his Christian name, how he used to be a taxi driver, etc. I know that this particular kind of book (i.e. one without any literary pretensions whatsoever) sacrifices everything else at the altar of Plot. But there are plot-driven books with better, more interesting characterizations in them.The book ends with a couple of unresolved things. In more capable hands they might have felt like the natural dirtiness of life but here they just felt contrived.For a veteran detective, Sejer makes several astonishing mistakes -- like wondering what exactly Raymond and Ragnhilde did together for so long.Everytime I read one of these Scandinavian crime fiction books I can't help but think that the "Scandinavian" moniker gets them some extra, unwarranted, kudos. This book could very easily take place in America, for instance. If it did, would people be as enamored of it?
—Justus
