Crime Fiction

REVIEW: Norwegian by Night by Derek Miller

Rating: 4/5 Stars
Genre: Suspense/Crime Fiction
Audience: Adult

Summary: Recently widowed and still haunted by the death of his son decades ago in Vietnam, Sheldon Horowitz is an impatient and crotchety old man. He’s a little depressed and feels alone now that all of his friends and family are dead except for his granddaughter Rhea. Believing her grandfather suffers from dementia, Rhea has convinced Sheldon to move to Oslo to live with her and her Norwegian husband. Sheldon finds the laid-back attitude of the Norwegian people incomprehensible and persists in sharing his oddball philosophical musings, thus calling his mental state into further question. Then he witnesses the murder of his Serbian neighbor and goes on the lam with her young son, believing it is the only way to protect the boy from Kosovar gangsters. Rhea and the police inspector, Sigrid Ødegård, think Sheldon has suffered a mental break, but could Sheldon’s unusual actions be more wily than anyone could guess?

First Lines:
“It is summer and luminous. Sheldon Horowitz sits on a folding director’s chair, high above the picnic and out of reach of the food, in a shaded enclave in Oslo’s Frogner Park.”

Tracy’s Thoughts:
In his debut novel, Miller offers a completely different take on the Scandinavian crime fiction wave popularized by authors like Larsson, Mankell, Nesbø, Fossum, and Läckberg. Critically acclaimed but under the radar of most readers, Norwegian by Night was named by both Kirkus Reviews and The Guardian as one of the best crime novels of 2013. It’s not your typically plot-centered crime novel—though there are some definite machinations and exciting bits. Instead, its focus is on Sheldon’s inner thoughts and his path to redemption. Now that he has taken responsibility for this young boy, Sheldon is reminded more than ever of his son and sees this “final mission” as a way to do something that matters again and to atone for what he sees as his own culpability in his son’s death.

You see, Sheldon was a marine sniper in Korea and has felt useless ever since. That is, if you believe Sheldon’s latest story. On previous occasions, he always told his late wife and granddaughter a different story of his time in Korea. Sheldon, with his visions and inconsistent stories, is a bit of an unreliable narrator. Both reader and the characters in the book are left to wonder whether Sheldon is
truly senile or if he’s just crazy sharp, with a unique way of looking at the world. In a way, despite the fact that the protagonist is 82 years old, Norwegian by Night could be considered a coming of age novel—or perhaps a coming to terms with age novel.

Sheldon is a fascinating and insightful character, with plenty of foibles and flaws to add interest. And his journey is incredibly relatable despite the unusual circumstances. Though some of the other characters—Rhea and her husband Lars, for example—could do with some fleshing out, some of the secondary characters are also quite intriguing. Sigrid serves as a wonderful contrast to Sheldon, and some of her conversations also provide unexpected humor to the largely reflective narrative. Take this dryly comical phone conversation with her father:

     “Have you met a nice man yet?”
     Sigrid nods. “I’d been meaning to tell you. I got married and had three sons.”
    “That’s wonderful news.”
    “Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They’re delightful, but have speech impediments and very short legs.”

Some of the scenes with Sigrid were my absolute favorites in the novel, particularly the Psycho bit (saying anything more could prove too much of a spoiler). And although the crime plot was somewhat understated, I was fascinated (and appalled) by some of the insight into Serbian/Kosovar hostilities and the cycle of violence. The contrast of different nationalities and ethnicities—Norwegian, American, Jewish, Serbian, Kosovar—and their effects on various characters’ way of life and way of thinking elevate a simple plot into something far more.

Norwegian by Night is a a quiet thriller with literary bones. Despite a few lengthy expositions and a somewhat ambiguous ending, it offers something different and interesting to the crime fiction genre as it addresses a number of important issues—war, personal and ethnic identity, and aging—with compassion, insight, and humor.

GUEST REVIEW: Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty? And Other Notorious Nursery Tale Mysteries by David Levinthal and John Nickle

Rating: 4/5 Stars
Genre: Picture Book/Humor/Mystery/Fractured Fairy Tales
Audience: Ages 4–8

First lines: “There are eight million stories in the forest. This is one of them.”

Allison’s Guest Summary & Review:
With a title like this, I couldn’t help picking up this read. Officer Binky is a fun character, rife with all the characteristics of a gumshoe detective, who investigates the crimes occurring in five fairy tale classics. Kids will be familiar with these stories, retold afresh without reinvention, and complete with tongue in cheek references. But children will also be enthralled by Levinthal’s artwork–an appealing acrylic montage. All in all, this was a fun read, which should keep kids laughing!

REVIEW: The Cutting Season by Attica Locke

Rating: 3.5/5 Stars
Genre: Literary Mystery, Southern Fiction
Audience: Adult

Summary: Caren Gray is a strong, educated African American woman and a single mother. She has mixed feelings about managing Belle Vie, the sprawling plantation where she grew up and where her ancestors were once slaves. Despite the unease that the former slave cabins instill in her, she feels tied to the place. But when an immigrant sugar cane worker is found dead on the edge of Belle Vie and Caren decides to launch her own investigation, all of her latent misgivings are stirred up again. And even as centuries-old secrets from the past rise up from the past, in the present Caren begins to fear that her nine-year-old daughter may know more about the murder than she’s telling.

First Line: It was during the Thompson-Delacroix wedding, Caren’s first week on the job, that a cottonmouth, measuring the length of a Cadillac, fell some twenty feet from a live oak on the front lawn, landing like a coil of rope in the lap of the bride’s future mother-in-law.

Tracy’s Thoughts:
A nuanced mystery with gothic undertones, Attica Locke’s second novel (after Black Water Rising) is far more than a typical whodunit. The atmospheric Southern setting and eerie history of slavery permeate the plot, adding depth and weight to the story. Issues of race, class, and history are key, but these themes are seamlessly and subtly integrated into the plot rather than a carelessly tacked on “moral.”

Attica Locke’s writing is stellar, descriptive and even poetic at times: “[B]eneath its its loamy topsoil, the manicured grounds and gardens, two centuries of
breathtaking wealth and spectacle, lay a land both black and bitter,
soft to the touch, but pressing in its power.” However, I did not find the characters quite as captivating as the setting. I had a bit of a struggle warming up to Caren, who is a bit of a mystery herself. I appreciated that she is a strong but flawed woman, and I was pulling for her 100%, and yet, for me, she remains distant throughout the novel.

But despite my quibbles (and, if you haven’t noticed by now, I almost always have quibbles), I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The linkage of past and present, along with the blending of history, social issues, and various relationship issues make for a complex and satisfying read.

REVIEW: I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga

Rating: 3.5/5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction/Suspense
Audience: Older Teen/Young Adult
Series: Jasper Dent #1

Summary: What if your father is the most notorious serial killer of the century? What if you were trained to be the perfect killer from the time you were a child? Seventeen-year-old Jazz, son of the infamous Billy Dent, has to live with that reality every day. Jazz never truly understood how wrong his childhood was until the day Billy was arrested four years ago. As a child, Jazz played with human teeth like dice; by nine, he knew how to dissolve a body in quicklime. His father brainwashed him to believe that Dents are superior and above the laws that govern the rest of mankind. For Jazz, it is instinctive to size up his “prey,” quickly assessing the best ways to charm and immobilize his victims. But Jazz hasn’t killed anyone. Yet. Or, at least no one that he remembers.

Jazz’s greatest fear is ending up a killer like “Dear Old Dad.” Ever since his father’s arrest, Jazz has been living as normal a life as possible, despite the fact that his grandmother/official guardian suffers from dementia and is notoriously strange. But now a new serial killer in on the loose in Lobo’s Nod and Jazz fears his past is coming back to haunt him. So he decides to use his inside knowledge of a serial killer’s mind to be on the side of good, launching his own investigation into the identity of the “Impressionist,” whose crimes are eerily similar to those of Billy Dent.

First Line: “By the time Jazz got to the field outside town, yellow police tape was everywhere, strung from stake to stake in a sort of drunken, off-kilter hexagon.”   

Tracy’s Thoughts:
Do you love Dexter and Criminal Minds? Or maybe Chelsea Cain’s Archie and Gretchen series is your cup of tea? Perhaps you wish there were more (or, any) books like this in the YA genre? Then you won’t want to miss the first installment of Barry Lyga’s Jasper Dent series! It’s deliciously twisted—taking an all-too-realistic look at the thoughts and actions of a sociopath—without becoming overly explicit. But the restraint regarding gratuitous blood and gore actually makes I Hunt Killers all the creepier.

The mystery aspect of this book is compelling if not wholly original. For me, the true appeal was in the characterization of Jazz. Every dark thought and insight into the mind of the killer causes him to wonder if he is destined to become a killer himself. While he doesn’t mind using his childhood lessons to his
advantage—Jasper is a master of reading and manipulating people, knowing
exactly how to smile and push the right buttons to get what he wants—he
can’t help feeling a prickle of guilt at the ease of it and worry that
one day he will step over an invisible line he can’t come back from.Still struggling (understandably) with the brainwashing of his childhood, Jazz has a personal mantra to keep himself human: “People matter. People are real.” He considers it a way of “casting a shield against his own evil.” And  even more intriguing than the who-is-the-killer plot thread is the mystery of Jazz’s past. His mother disappeared years ago and Jazz is almost sure is father killed her, but he can’t know for certain. Also, there are those events from his past that Jazz can’t quite recall.

Unsurprisingly, given its parallels to other popular TV shows, I Hunt Killers may also be coming soon to the small screen—it was optioned by Warner Bros. for development early on. As for book two in the series? We’ll have to wait until April 2013.