Psychological detective novel, one of the characters, Irma, reminds me of [The Sister] by Poppy Adams. ( )

I first read Fossum's Don't Look Back and felt I had found a worthy author. It was a decent police procedural with interesting detectives and 'reasonable' bad guys. The Devil Holds the Candle was very different. In it there was almost no police procedure, way too much depiction of the uninteresting lives of the baddies and what little more development of Inspector Sejer there was (now with a girlfriend) showed him as someone who is very reserved and, for me, that made him much harder to relate to. Fossum also mystified me by, at a critical point, calling up Sejer's appreciation of his subordinate's, Skarre's, intuition and then having Sejer fail to follow through on it in a meaningful way. I found this book thoroughly unsatisfying.

This is the second Fossum mystery I have read and I was disappointed, perhaps less because of the story and more because of my personal preferences. A beautiful, angelic-looking teenage boy has gone missing, though he is hardly the angelic boy that his mother insists he is. His best friend knows more than he's telling. So do others. It's a race between time and madness (hey! no spoilers here.) This is, for all intents and purposes, a psychological thriller not a police procedural, and it's clear I prefer the latter. While the story kept me reading (another book where I felt I had read it before), I was disappointed that the crime was not solved by the pavement-pounding, clever brilliance of the detectives on the case. Sigh. ( )

Godt skrevet. Kunne hidse mig op til at tænke: Så gør dog noget, mens jeg læste den. Dvs. undersøg dog huset grundigt, i stedet for bare at gå igen! ( )

Loved this when I was a teenager!