With a somewhat philosophical title, this is Gunnar Staalesen’s latest Varg Veum book to appear in English. As a private detective, Veum is unusual in Scandinavian crime fiction and here he’s hired by a woman to find her missing husband. He’s an executive in a company planning to build a wind farm on a pristine Norwegian island but what’s curious is that he’s gone missing in the same place that his previous wife went missing 17 years earlier. Eventually, Veum finds the man but in doing so becomes embroiled in a conflict involving the wind farm’s builders and various local and environmental factions, and he and those close to him won’t get away unscathed. Masterful and character driven, said our reviewer Jeremy Megraw, here.
