After reading as many Mankell novels as have appeared in English (at least in the UK), I decided to stretch a little further afield and move from Sweden into Norway for my next detective fiction.
Karin Fossum was a name that was mentioned, so I picked up the slim Don’t Look Back, and fairly rattled through it. It’s an “Inspector Sejer” Mystery, and although not the first in the series, it is the first to have made it into English.
The book is set in a village on the edge of a mountain, somewhere just outside Oslo, where a young girl is found dead. As might be expceted is such a novel, there is more going on in the village than might at first be apparent.
I quite enjoyed the book, although the descriptor “procedural” might be a little more accurate than normal in this case. There aren’t any unguessable plot twists, although the story is disturbing. In many respects these Scandinavean novels are really very British in their outlook.