Police procedural set in WARWICKSHIRE (with added AI)
Thriller set in the OSLO suburbs
15th November 2022
The Lover by Helene Flood, thriller set in the Oslo suburbs. Translated by Alison McCullough.
The Lover is somehow very Norwegian. It is largely set in an apartment block in the Oslo suburb of Tåsen. Jørgen, in the top apartment, is murdered one Saturday afternoon – slouched over his desk with his throat cut. He is survived my his wife Merete and his daughter Filippa. The police investigate and are pretty sure that no one has broken into the block: they suspect one of the residents living in the six apartments.
And they are a pretty dubious lot. Many could have possible motivation for seeing Jørgen dead. Rikke, in the apartment immediately below Jørgen and Merete’s, faces a dilemma. She had been having an affair with Jørgen, does not want to tell the police (but feels she ought to), and quite certainly does not not want to tell her husband, Åsmund. She does a deal with police – tells them everything about the affair, but buys some time before the information becomes public – she agrees to tell Åsmund before it does. Until them her life will continue to be a lie.
Suspicions grow as the police interview all the residents in the block. Everyone sees everyone else in a new light. One morning Rikke finds a dead kitten hanging from her mailbox and this ties in with several similar events in the neighbourhood over previous weeks. Everyone wonders. Could the cat killings and Jørgen’s murder be somehow connected? Might there be a really sick psychopath out there? Or, worse still, – if the police are correct in saying no one broke in – could such a person be living amongst them?
The books moves on to an ingeniously worked conclusion – to which, if I had been paying sufficient attention, several clues had been left in the preceding 400 pages (yes, it is quite a long book…).
The Lover is another fine example of #ScandiNoir. Recommended.
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