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BODY IN THE FJORD, THE
by Katherine Hall Page
Avon, November 1998
271 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0380731290


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Even though this is part of the Faith Fairchild Mystery Series, we don't see much of Faith at all here. In this book, her friend, Pix Miller and her mother, Ursula Rowe, are off to Norway to help Ursula's childhood friend, Marit Hansen. Marit's granddaughter, Kari and Kari's fiancÈ Erik, were tour guides with Scandie Sights Tour when Erik was murdered and Kari disappeared.

Having no faith in the Norwegian police, Marit wants Pix and Ursula to join the tour on the latter part of the trip. It will be their task to find out why Erik was murdered and to find the missing Kerri. It also comes to them that they will need to clear Kerri's name because the police have named her as a suspect in her fiancÈ's death!

Pix and Ursula join the tour group and nose around but don't find out much about Erik and Kari. They soon discover that someone is troubled by all of their questions though. Pix is soon locked in a sauna, finds a threatening note in her jacket pocket, and later finds the body of another tour member, Oscar Melling. Pix then learns that she is a possible suspect in his murder.

To make matters even more complicated, a swastika is painted on the front lawn of one their hotels bringing to light its sordid connections to the country's past Nazi history.

Pix, of course, solves the Kari and Erik mystery but not before she is kidnapped, imprisoned, and escapes.

This book is filled with information about Norway. Lots and lots of information. There are times it reads like a Norwegian Tour book. We're told, in depth, about the museums, hotels, Norwegian history, jewelry, artifacts, antiques, and food.

The mystery is bogged down with too many possible reasons why Erik was murdered. Was it because of oil, antiques, jewelry, or did he just eat too much and collapse in the fjord?

Food is another big part of THE BODY IN THE FJORD. There are a ton of recipes at the end of the book, and when a dish is mentioned in the text we're given the recipe's page number so we can go to it to whip it up ourselves. This takes the readers out of the story and I found it very off-putting.

THE BODY IN THE FJORD is overloaded and slowed down by too many facts about Norway. It was nice reading about the boat tour in the fjord and learning a little bit about the glaciers, but there was too much information about furniture, and jewelry, and history, and food, food, food. Okay, I get it, the Norwegians love their fish. Yes, we need some of the details to understand the ending of the book, but there was just far too much of it.

The characters weren't really complete either. Pix and Ursula were fine, but I didn't care if Kari, the granddaughter, was ever found or if she killed her fiancÈ or not. To be honest, Katherine Hall Page did a better job creating some of the side characters in the book. I found I was more interested in the Peterson family from the tour than I was in Marit's family.

Most of THE BODY IN THE FJORD seemed to be contrived. I couldn't figure out why Marit asked her friend, all the way from the United States, to travel to Norway to find her granddaughter. And why Pix and her elderly mother agreed to drop everything to go right away seemed to be the real mystery of this story to me.

The story itself was just okay. Maybe if Faith Fairchild went along with Pix the book might have been better.

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, June 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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