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WHAT NEVER HAPPENS
by Anne Holt
Grand Central Publishing, February 2008
389 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0446578037


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Inspector Adam Stubo of the Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service is on paternity leave. His partner, FBI profiler, Johanne Vik, has just had a baby, and he is on his way to the hospital with Johanne's brain-damaged ten-year-old daughter, Kristiane, to visit the hours old new sister.

The phone rings. It is a colleague asking him to come to the scene of the murder of a TV interviewer with features on a very popular one-hour show. Her tongue has been removed, split in half, and placed lovingly into an origami flower made of red paper. Stubo hangs up on Berli and returns to the task of getting Kristiane ready to visit the hospital.

When Adam returns to work two weeks later, the crime is still unsolved. Johanne is having trouble in their new home. She is used to living in an apartment in Oslo and they have just purchased a duplex in the suburbs. She is not sleeping, although Adam is helping with the new baby, and Kristiane's father takes the girl to stay with him periodically.

Meanwhile, other gory murders of celebrities are taking place in Oslo and Adam is assigned to the case. Johanne had profiling training at the FBI school in the US more than a decade before, so in order to take her mind off her current problems, Adam brings home the case files, so she can go through them and discuss possibilities.

Meanwhile, the scene keeps shifting to other parts of the world, mainly the French Riviera and a mysterious woman, who, unbeknownst to the Norwegian police, is an expatriate Norwegian, and the murderer.

This is the second in a trilogy. Stubo and Vik work and live together. Vik is the more damaged of the pair. Stubo seems to be the one keeping everything in one piece. It's a police procedural with a difference. The descriptions of the murders are horrifying and it seems as though everyone in Oslo is depressed and/or damaged in some way. This is a fascinating book but not easy reading. The way is left open at the end for the author to torture Vik some more.

This book is also known as THE FINAL MURDER.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, December 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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