The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde

First published in Norway in 2017; published in translation by HarperVia on January 14, 2020

The End of the Ocean is told from two perspectives in alternating chapters. Signe’s story begins in the present. David’s begins about 20 years later, when a drought is threatening his life and that of his daughter Lou.

David, with his son, daughter, and wife Anna, left southern France to make his way to a camp. In light of the water shortage, David felt a responsibility to stay at the desalination plant where he worked, but the electricity upon which the plant depends is no longer reliable. It is ironic, he thinks, that coal-fired power plants contributed to global warming and thus to the water shortage, yet producing more fresh water depends on those same power plants. Seeing no end to the vicious cycle, Anna insists that they try their luck at a camp where they might at least be able to find food. A raging fire leaves them with little choice.

Before David’s story begins, David and Lou are separated from Anna and his son. David arrives at the camp and waits for his wife to appear. His story describes his tormented wait as the camp’s food and water supplies dwindle. His relationships with Lou and with a damaged woman named Marguerite who befriends Lou in the camp grow more difficult every day. Eventually their survival may depend on whether it rains again, filling a channel that will allow them to travel to the ocean, where David can use his expertise in desalination to provide them with water for the rest of their lives.

The present from which the elderly Signe narrates her story is lived on a boat that she sails from Norway to France. She plans to make a grand gesture with a load of glacier ice that, before she stole it, was intended for sale to the wealthy.

Much of Signe’s story is told in memory, adding a third time frame to the story. Signe grew up in a Norwegian village but made her life in Bergen. A company purchased water rights to the Sister Falls. It intended to divert the water to a power plant, destroying Norway’s most scenic waterfalls. Signe’s mother owns a significant share of the company. The plan will make her wealthy. Signe’s mother has already argued with her father about an earlier plan to divert the waters of a river, a plan that destroyed local agriculture.

Signe lived with Magnus, whose family lost its farm after the river ran dry. Magnus was an engineer who viewed the destruction of nature as inevitable, a sign of human grandeur. The rift between Signe’s parents will eventually replicate in Signe’s relationship with Magnus, as Signe’s long-term concern with the environment clashes with Magnus’ short-term desire to accumulate wealth. Signe’s protest against delivering pure glacier water to the wealthy when climate change threatens the availability of water for everyone begins the novel and plays a central role in its ending.

The End of the Ocean is a cautionary story of environmental destruction, but emotional honesty is the novel’s strength. The novel imagines good people making hard choices, compelling the reader to share each character’s agony. Can Signe bear to give birth to Magnus’ baby? Can David allow Marguerite into his life if sharing a dwindling water supply with her will threaten Lou’s survival? If short-term survival is a fundamentally selfish act, is it better not to prolong one’s life?

The reader will spot the ending that ties the two stories together long before it arrives, but it is the ending that the reader will want. The novel builds suspense in both timelines while raising the kind of serious ethical questions that book club members might enjoy debating.

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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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The Oslo Conspiracy by Asle Skredderberget

First published in Norway in 2013; published in translation by St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books on October 25, 2016

In 1977, an Italian naval ship sinks after an explosion. More than 20 years later, Ingrid Tollefsen is strangled in her hotel room in Rome. How those two events are related is the question that the reader is invited to ponder as The Oslo Conspiracy unfolds.

As a financial crimes investigator, Milo Cavalli doesn’t usually get involved in murder investigations, but the Italian police won’t release Ingrid’s body until Oslo sends a detective to Rome, and Milo, who has ties to Italy, happens to be available. Coincidentally — or not — Ingrid’s younger brother Tormod was killed in a school shooting in Oslo two years earlier.

Ingrid was employed in the pharmaceutical industry and Tormod had an ampoule of steroids in his hand when he died. Those facts lead Milo on an investigation of Ingrid’s uncooperative employer, a company that refuses to disclose the nature of her research projects. Milo also noses around gym rats who smuggle steroids and encounters a witness in Tormod’s case who is trying to avoid deportation from Norway.

Ingrid might also have been having an affair. All of that adds up to several potential but vague motives to do away with Ingrid. The reader follows Milo and he bounces around Oslo, Rome, and New York in pursuit of clues. The multiple plotlines are juggled with care. The story is moderately complex but not confusing. The plot didn’t captivate me, but it sustained my interest.

Milo has a girlfriend in Italy but he doesn’t want to give up his job in Oslo, even though he has enough wealth to live without working. Milo spends a good bit of time obsessing about other women (hey, he's Italian), which periodically sends him to confession (again,he's Italian), where he argues about morality with a priest. I suppose the relationship drama serves to give Milo some depth, but Milo’s relationship with his family members is more intriguing, given its tie-in to the novel’s plot elements.

The novel is interesting for many reasons, not least for its penetrating look at the pharmaceutical industry. Asle Skredderberget’s portrayal of Norway’s response to immigrants who overstay visas is timely, given the American debate about undocumented immigrants. The political dimensions of the story aren’t heavy-handed and they never get in the way of Skredderberget’s storytelling. The Oslo Conspiracy isn’t the most thrilling example of Scandinavian crime fiction I’ve encountered, but the story is credible and its leisurely pace allows the plot and characterizations to develop in a meaningful way.

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The Lion's Mouth by Anne Holt

First published in Norway in 1997; published by Scribner on February 9, 2016

The Lion’s Mouth begins with the murder of the prime minister in her office. Since prime ministers in Norway are too dull to assassinate, the murder puzzles Hanne Wilhelmsen, who (together with Billy T and every other law enforcement agent in Norway) is assigned to investigate it.

Although the prime minister was not in a locked room, the novel has the feel of a locked room mystery. The entrances to the office are limited. Security guards and a secretary should prevent strangers from gaining access to the office. It should not be possible to bring an unauthorized handgun into the building and no weapon is present at the scene. And, oddly enough, the prime minister’s shawl is missing, along with a pillbox.

The last person to see the prime minister was Benjamin Grinde, a Supreme Court Justice. That makes him a suspect, but an unlikely one. His detention for questioning by Billy T. nonetheless makes a good news story, one that is unearthed by Lise “Little” Lettvik, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking newspaper reporter who is far from little.

All of this is background to an intricate plot that also makes frequent mention of a statistically anomalous increase in childhood deaths in Norway in 1965. That fact comes up so often in the early-going that it will obviously tie into the main plot. The question is: how?

Anne Holt assembles a cast of potential murderers, all of whom seem to have an alibi. Whether the killer’s motivation was political or personal, how the killer managed the crime, and how it ties in with the 1965 spike in dead children are questions the reader is invited to ponder as the investigation moves forward. All of that is handled effectively and credibly. The answer to the mystery becomes obvious a few chapters before the police figure it out, but only a few. And that only means that Holt played fair with the reader, providing clues that the reader could assemble to arrive at the truth. A final reveal at the end, however, comes as a surprise.

Character development is about average for a murder mystery. The discussions of Norwegian politics and history are easy to follow, even for a reader (like me) who knows almost nothing about Norway. Holt’s prose is graceful in translation. I’m not sure I quite accepted the motivation of a key character to act as he did, and a coincidence that occurs midway through the story is a bit too convenient, but those are minor quibbles. All told, The Lion’s Mouth is a fine political mystery/police procedural. It isn’t outstanding but it is enjoyable and a nice change from American or British novels of the same ilk.

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Scarred by Thomas Enger

Published in Norway in 2013; published in translation in Great Britain in 2014; published digitally by Atria Books on November 4, 2014

Ole Christian Sund works in an eldercare home where his young son discovers that a resident has been murdered and mutilated. Journalist Henning Juul covers the story. Oslo Police Detective Bjarne Brogeland conducts the police investigation. Early chapters of Scarred develop the plot by focusing on either Juul or Brogeland.

The third primary character is Juul's sister, Trine Juul-Osmundsen, who is Norway's Secretary of State for Justice. She merits chapters of her own as she deals with an alleged sex scandal that is both personal and political. Other chapters focus on a killer and his victims.

As is often true of crime novels involving multiple murders, the detective's challenge (and the reader's) is to deduce the factor that links the victims. In addition to that plot thread, part of the story focuses on Juul's efforts to learn about the fire that killed his son (about which a source promised to divulge information before being killed in prison). The fire presumably occurred in an earlier novel, but this is the first in the series that I've read.

Another plot thread, of course, has the reader wondering if someone is setting up Juul-Osmundsen, who clearly did something that she wants to conceal but perhaps not what she is accused of doing. The behavior of which she is accused struck me as too improbable for the public to take seriously, but perhaps the public in Norway is just as eager as in America to read scandalous accusations from anonymous sources that no respectable news organization would report.

Thomas Enger's depiction of Norway's political system is filled with the back-stabbing and pettiness that probably characterizes political systems everywhere. It is also describes irresponsible news media that are familiar features of many countries. I enjoyed the setting and background of Scarred. The characters are reasonably interesting although the evolution of the novel's serial killer is disappointingly familiar.

This isn't the kind of novel that lets the reader guess the killer's identity (at least, not until shortly before it is revealed) so if that's the kind of whodunit you like, Scarred might not be the right book for you. The reader is, however, challenged to guess the identity of Juul-Osmundsen's nemesis. Not every plot thread is tied off in this novel and, as in many series, it is probably better to read the books in order rather than starting with this one. Scarred can nevertheless be read as an entertaining stand-alone. Plot twists are creative and unexpected, characters are well-developed, and the translated prose is smooth.

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