Occasionally -- but not often enough, clearly -- American readers get a glimpse of the wealth of mysteries being written and read outside the former British Empire. Since 1994, the sometimes silly but usually clever thrillers of Spaniard Arturo Perez-Reverte have been available in the United States. And to this day I am grateful to the professor who loaned me his 30-year-old copy of "Murder at the Savoy," a wonderful novel by Swedes Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, whose work has, sadly, been out of print in the United States for some time.
And now I can add Norwegian Karin Fossum to the list. "Don't Look Back" is her first US publication. And it's about time: Her earlier mystery novels have been translated into 16 languages and have been available in the United Kingdom for two years.
Inspector Konrad Sejer visits the village of Granittveien to investigate the disappearance of 6-year-old Ragnhild Album. She eventually reappears, unharmed. But she mentions that she saw a female body lying on the ground in the woods "quite still and with no clothes on."
The body turns out to be that of 15-year-old Annie Holland: A good athlete, good student, dutiful to her parents, kind to small children, Annie appears to have been a favorite with everyone. To complicate matters, there's no evidence of sexual assault.
And after Sejer starts asking questions, Annie's murder becomes only more puzzling. He unearths a lot of secrets. He finds a lot of unhappiness in Granittveien, and a long-ago crime or two. But nothing that adds up to a reason to kill Annie.
Admittedly, none of this is terribly original: Fictional crimes, like real-life ones, are simply variations on well-known themes. A mystery's effect lies in its power to make us forget that fact by making its characters seem real to us.
And Fossum's characters are painfully real. Raymond Lake -- who, with the child, found Annie's body -- is a man with Down syndrome and pedophilic impulses, the sole caregiver for his elderly father, and a poignant mixture of perversion and innocence.
