My initial reaction as I started to read was wondering about how well-served the author has been by her translator. Either that or, with my apologies to Jo Nesbo (blurb on the cover: 'a truly great writer'), Karin Fossum is NOT a truly great writer. The descriptions seemed flat and very bland, and the dialogue was .... well, it was awful. Each "conversation" read like two people who don't speak the language, using a 1950s Berlitz phrasebook to cobble something together.
The police procedural part of the novel is laughable: a woman witnesses a murder. She throws up in the murdered woman's bathroom. She does a Jackson Pollack on the bathroom -- vomit everywhere. She tries to clean it up with toilet paper, and winds up clogging up the toilet. And six months later, the police are still investigating the murder, completely unaware that there was a third person in the flat when the murder happened. That's when I gave up ...
The police procedural part of the novel is laughable: a woman witnesses a murder. She throws up in the murdered woman's bathroom. She does a Jackson Pollack on the bathroom -- vomit everywhere. She tries to clean it up with toilet paper, and winds up clogging up the toilet. And six months later, the police are still investigating the murder, completely unaware that there was a third person in the flat when the murder happened. That's when I gave up ...
