Johanne Vik » How Mysterious!

Anne Holt, The Final Murder

Mar 142012

With one exception I liked Anne Holt’s first book with Johanne Vik and Adam Stubo well enough, but somehow never got around to looking for any of the others. Then somebody (sorry, forgot who) posted a review of a more recent book and that was all the prodding I needed. The Final Murder picks up a couple years later when Johanne and Adam have just had a baby, and a new serial killer comes to town.

First, a popular female television host is murdered, her body defiled in a most peculiar way. Then, a politician is killed. Johanne, who’s been trained by the FBI as a profiler, begins to recognize a pattern, and she thinks she even knows who will be the killer’s final victim: her own husband.

If you like serial killer plots, this is a pretty good one; if you’re more interested in characters, this might not be your best choice. Adam spends half the book fretting about not being at home on his paternity leave, and Johanne worries obsessively about the new baby — not an unwarranted worry, given that her first child has developmental issues, but nonetheless not really entertaining to read about.

I like this series, but not as well as Karin Fossum or Camilla Läckberg, to name just a couple of other Nordic women crime fiction writers, but if you like serial killer plots you may enjoy it more than I do.

What Is Mine

Uncategorized 3 Responses »

Nov 242010

Anne Holt’s What Is Mine (2001) is her first book in English and the first of a three-book series featuring Johanne Vik and Adam Stubo as a profiler/psychologist and a slightly pyschic Oslo police detective, respectively.

Two stories come together here, but yet again the subject is dead and missing children; however, the violence against them is not graphically discussed, and the fact that one child may still be alive gave me enough hope to keep reading.

In the first storyline, an elderly woman contacts Johanne about a man named Aksel Seier, whom she believes was wrongly convicted of killing a child many years ago. Johanne’s academic research interests lead her to try to find the man and figure out what happened to him after he was suddenly and inexplicably released.

In the second storyline, several children throughout Norway have been kidnapped and killed, then returned to their parents with a note that says, “Now you got what you deserved.” Stubo is assigned to the case, but he wants Johanne to use her profiling skills to help him. Because one child’s body has not been returned, Adam and Johanne hope she is still alive and hope to figure out who has her before she dies, too.

I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that I was disturbed when, after the killer is found and captured, Holt seemed to try to make the person more sympathetic by including flashbacks to childhood memories. I did not want that person to be comforted or their actions in any way excused, and that disturbed me. Aside from that, I was very engaged by this book and thought it raised some interesting questions about fathers and children, guilt and innocence in a very readable manner.

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Book #10 of 12 in the Thriller and Suspense Challenge