20 Books of Summer: What Never Happens by Anne Holt

In all the years participating in Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge I’ve paid little attention to Norway. Other than Norwegian author Erika Fatland’s travelogue Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, Neal Bascomb’s The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb and Nordic Noir novelist Anne Holt’s whodunnit 1222 I’ve read nothing representing a country that boasts both the world’s fourth-highest per-capita income and internationally best-selling Nordic Noir author Jo Nesbø. In hopes of addressing my my Norway avoidance problem I recently decided to give Anne Holt another chance and grabbed a copy of her 2008 crime novel What Never Happens from the public library. On one hand I’m unsure if I enjoyed it as much as I did 1222 but on the other hand I wasn’t disappointed either.

A serial killer is terrorizing Oslo. Unlike those who prey upon society’s downtrodden and invisible like sex workers, the drug addicted and impoverished this serial killer is murdering celebrities. First a TV talk show host is found dead with her tongue cut out and forked to imply she’s a liar. Next, a politician, soon to be married, is found murdered in her apartment symbolically impaled with a copy of the Koran. Not long after that the body of an outspoken literary critic is found, his eye stabbed with a writing pen. With none of the victims appearing connected in any way all of Oslo is on edge, especially the city’s movers and shakers. Instead of spending evenings on the town cavorting at elegant theaters, high-end restaurants or other gala events the elite hunker down at home fearful of being the next victim.

Investigating these murders is Police Commissioner Adam Stubo and his wife, FBI-trained profiler Johanne Vik. The husband and wife duo, fresh off the birth of their child find themselves up against a most formidable adversary. Aware each victim was silently and efficiently killed at home without any witnesses they realize they’re looking for a murder who is highly intelligent, talented and patient. Far from being some crazed madman who kills impulsively this one murders with almost professional like precision, each murder deliberately choreographed to reflect some aspect of the victim’s personality. Needless to say this will be a damn hard case to solve.