At first glance, this book checked a lot of boxes for me. (Which is why I picked it up to begin with.) The top has a quote from Jo Nesbo saying that the author is "the godmother of modern Norwegian crime fiction." Not only do I really enjoy Nesbo's books, but I also like modern Norwegian crime fiction. The front cover also says under the title that it is a Hanne Wilhelmsen novel. This is appealing to me because it means that if I like it, I can read others in the series and reasonably expect to like them too. (The top of the front jacket says it's the 9th book in the series, so that's a pretty deep catalog to mine.
Based on these characteristics, I added it to my stack of library check-outs and I was on my way.
Getting started with the book I was really disappointed. I just couldn't seem to get interested in it and it took me a really long time to get into it. In fact, I had to renew all the books I had checked out at the library before I was even half way through this one!
I can't put my finger on the real reason I couldn't get into it either. One possible reason is that there were very few section breaks in the beginning. Or at least there seemed to be. That was an issue because my main reading time is on the train home from work. It's only a short block of time and I always seemed to get to my stop and find myself in the middle of a long section. That meant that when I started the next day I was jumping right back into a conversation or description and I'd take me some time to get back into the flow of that section. Admittedly it wasn't much time, but my time was limited to begin with.
Another issue might have been the fact that I started with the 9th book in the series. I wonder if my experience would have been the same if I started with the first and had a well developed sense of the characters (at least the main ones) by the time I got to this one.
Anyway, all that changed about midway through the book. All of a sudden the pieces strewn about in the first part started to come together and I found myself really drawn in. I'm glad I stuck with it because I was close to moving on to the next book in my stack.
I wasn't so much interested in the "main" character (Hanne) which might not bode well for me in the rest of the series. However she seemed to be passing the torch of "Oslo's greatest detective" (my title) to a protege. And I really liked the protege character. A man of odd looks, with OCD and possible autism, and a decent ability to draw hypothesis from random facts. For the looks, the character mentioned that as an advantage because no one was ever scared of him if he showed up randomly at their door. The OCD and possible autism were the obvious conclusions a reader might draw, although the character mentioned that he had never received an official diagnosis from a doctor. The looks and quirks are part of the basic recipe for brilliant detective.
Overall, I'm glad I preserved through the first part and I will definitely be adding other books in the series to my reading list.
(I know that I didn't talk at all about the plot, but with the title that part shouldn't be hard to figure out.)
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