Dead Joker by Anne Holt

Published in Norwegian in 1999; published in translation by Scribner on July 26, 2016

The Public Prosecutor’s wife has been decapitated. The Public Prosecutor tells Chief Inspector Hanna Wilhelmson that he witnessed the murder and did nothing to stop it. Unfortunately for his defense, the person he identifies as the killer was seen jumping off a bridge some days before the murder occurred. The Public Prosecutor’s fingerprints are all over the murder weapon and unless the murder was committed by a ghost, it sounds like a slam dunk case for Wilhelmson. It appears, however, that nothing is a slam dunk in Norway.

In fact, unlike American law enforcement officers, those in Norway seem to be incapable of believing that anyone they arrest is actually guilty -- at least, that’s the impression I get from reading Anne Holt’s novels. They bend over backwards to keep an open mind and never stop looking for evidence that might lead to a different suspect. I don’t know if that’s how things really work in Norway, but it’s refreshing to imagine law enforcement officers who are aware of their own fallibility. American cops would be jumping up and down with glee to have such a strong case, but nobody in Dead Joker seems to think there’s enough evidence to convict the man whose fingerprints were on the murder weapon, who waited an hour to report his wife’s death, and who is blaming the crime on a dead man.

A related plot thread involves Evald Bromo, who has a weakness for little girls. Now he’s certain that his crimes are about to be exposed. His story intersects with that of a character who describes himself as an Avenging Angel (he is, in fact, part of a group of angels). Of course, the story threads eventually tie together. They do so in a way that is plausible, that doesn’t overreach, and that leads to a couple of mild surprises at the end.

I applaud thriller authors who take the time to flesh out their characters, but there are too many scenes in Dead Joker that focus on characters’ lives in ways that struck me as superfluous. I’m also not sure we need to know quite as much as we are told about characters’ meals and choices of attire. While the story sets up a dramatic change in Wilhelmson’s life, Dead Joker could have been shortened by 50 to 100 pages without losing meaningful detail, and the result would have been a better novel. I liked the resolution of the plot threads in Dead Joker and I like the way characters develop in this novel and throughout the series, but I would have liked the book more if the writing had been tightened.

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