The Fifth Element by Jorgen Brekke

Published in Norway in 2013; published in translation by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on February 28, 2017

Rolf Fagerhus takes advantage of his position in the police to steal an Oslo drug dealer’s stash of cash. His wife has taken his daughter from him and Fagerhus intends to take her back. With the cash and forged passports, he plans to spirit his daughter away to Central America. His plan is complicated by his rushed decision to kidnap the drug dealer’s son, who witnessed his crime.

Odd Singsanker also works for the police. His wife, an American ex-cop named Felicia Stone, has disappeared, at least from Odd’s perspective. She had become irrationally jealous, they had a spat, and she went to Oslo to visit his son. But then she didn’t return to Trondheim as planned. From Felicia’s standpoint, she just dropped out for a while, making a series of impulsive decisions fueled by alcohol. When Felicia decides to go back to Trondheim, the weather impedes her return home, and since she wants to explain herself to Odd in person, she doesn’t call him before she rents a car and begins a treacherous drive. That’s always a dumb thing for a thriller character to do, and it doesn’t work out well for Felicia.

Like a good Scandinavian, Felicia takes time away from her life-threatening adventure to reflect on all the depressing events that have shaped her life, beginning at age 5. Felicia is so introspective, if not self-obsessed, that I liked her the least of all the characters.

Nearing the midway point, the novel takes a break from Odd and Felicia and tells the story of a young man named Knut who finds himself on the wrong side of a nasty drug dealer. Not long after that, it takes another break to tell the story of Sving, who solves the nasty drug dealer’s problems with a baseball bat and whose girlfriend wants him to blow up her husband. Sving’s section of the novel is quite amusing.

With its different episodes, The Fifth Element reads more like a series of related short stories than a novel, but the stories are all entertaining and they eventually link together. Maybe Odd Singsaker fans would want to see more of Odd, who plays almost a collateral role in the novel, but this is the first one in the series that I’ve read so I have no emotional investment in the character. All of the characters are portrayed with enough depth to give them substance, and the linked stories are engaging. Their eventual connection is clever, as later stories explain events that took place in earlier stories. Jorgen Brekke deserves credit for constructing the novel so carefully.

The ending is a little hokey, and the novel’s reliance on coincidence stretches the boundaries of plausibility, but those are minor flaws. On the whole, The Fifth Element tells an entertaining story that is enriched by interesting characters — although I generally found the crooks to be more interesting than the good guys.

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