Norwegian crime fiction returns to British screens on Saturday 13 April at 9pm with a third season of Wisting, based on the William Wisting novels by former police detective Jørn Lier Horst.
The case gets under way with two startling events. A British boy has gone missing from his family’s hotel, and one of the hotel’s employees has been found dead. Wisting – played by Sven Nordin – thinks the boy has been kidnapped, and when he starts talking to the shocked parents he begins to suspect the family has secrets of its own.
With echoes of The Missing, the Greenwoods are eager to find their son, Clifford. A ransom message is received and now Wisting thinks the kidnapping has taken place in revenge for something. Because a foreign child has gone missing, there is mounting pressure from the media and the higher ups to find the boy and Wisting attempts to set up surveillance, which seems to make matters worse.
Against police advice, the parents try to follow a lead themselves but this too ends in failure, and Andrew Greenwood – played by Rupert Evans – ends up in the hands of the kidnappers. They clearly want something from the family, and everything is linked to a tragic event in the past. Can Wisting unravel this and rescue Clifford Greenwood?
Although the case has an international angle, it doesn’t seem as though we’ll see the FBI profiler Maggie Griffin (Carrie-Anne Moss) with whom Wisting has worked in the past. However Thea Green Lundberg will return to play Line, Wisting’s daughter, who is a crime journalist and often becomes entangled in her father’s cases. Her ex-boyfriend Tommy has been mixing with dubious characters since their breakup.
Unlike the previous storylines, this season isn’t based on a particular book in the series. As with the Swedish series Beck, it focuses on the characters and setting rather than a novel. Jørn Lier Horst is still credited as a writer, with Henrik Georgsson replacing Trygve Allister Diesen as the director.
For anyone searching for information about Wisting, this story’s listing by BBC Four as ‘season three’ will be confusing. In Norway it aired as season four in March 2024. Going back to the original source, season one was based on The Cave Man and The Hunting Dogs, season two The Inner Darkness and season three The Night Man. In all, Jørn Lier Horst has written 17 novels in the Wisting series, of which nine have been translated into English, including The Traitor, due for release in November.
We’ve been fans of Jørn Lier Horst going all the way back to his first appearance in English with Dregs in 2011. You can also read this interview with him from 2019. Seasons one and two of Wisting are available on Amazon Prime and Acorn TV, or SBS in Australia.
This season consists of four 45-minute episodes, with English subtitles.
Four of the Wisting books have been published (confusingly) in the UK.under the heading of The Cold Cases Quartet.
So in reality 13 of the 17 Wisting novels have been translated into English. But adding to the confusion, they have not always appeared in the original (Norwegian) publication order.
The four untranslated books are the original ones of the series, dating back to 2006.
I am big fan of this series, having only come across the writer in ‘Covid times’. I assume I am not alone in hoping the ‘missing books’ will be published in English in the not too distant future.