Pursued by Death

Author(s): Gunnar Staalesen, Don Bartlett (translator)

Location(s): Bergen

Genre(s): Crime, Mystery

Era(s): Contemporary

[Gunnar Staalesen’s private detective Varg Veum is so celebrated in Norway that there is a statue of him in the building in Bergen where his fictional office is based].

When Varg Veum reads the newspaper headline ‘YOUNG MAN MISSING’, he realises he’s seen the youth just a few days earlier – at a crossroads in the countryside, with his two friends. It turns out that the three were on their way to a demonstration against a commercial fish-farming facility in the tiny village of Solvik, north of Bergen.

Varg heads to Solvik, initially out of curiosity, but when he chances upon a dead body in the sea, he’s pulled into a dark and complex web of secrets, feuds and jealousies.

Is the body he’s found connected to the death of a journalist who was digging into the fish farm’s operations two years earlier? And does either incident have something to do with the competition between the two powerful families that dominate Solvik’s salmon-farming industry?

Or are the deaths the actions of the ‘Village Beast’ – the brutal small-town justice meted out by rural communities in this part of the world.

Shocking, timely and full of breathtaking twists and turns, Pursued by Deathreaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world’s greatest crime writers.

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