Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum
The body of a teenaged girl is found naked on the side of an idyllic lake on Kollen Mountain. The local village is in mourning and shock. Who would kill want her dead? It seemed like everyone the police talked to liked, even loved, her. Inspector Sejer knows that the villagers hope an outsider killed the girl, but he feels that someone in the village is the killer.
Unlike a lot of Scandinavian mysteries (this one takes place in Norway) this one is a straightforward murder mystery. There isn’t a lot of blood and gore and the case involves a lot of good old fashioned police work like interviewing (and re-interviewing) suspects and witnesses. You’ll be well over halfway through the book and you’ll know how the victim died and you’ll still have no clue why. When you find out though, it all makes (a certain kind of) sense.
This is a long running mystery series and this book is the first of eight so far released in the United States.
(Interesting! I just noticed that we have a movie in our collection called The Girl by the Lake which is based on this novel. What's interesting is that the movie is set in a small village in Italy and it's a foreign film in Italian!)
