Scarred by Thomas Enger
Friday, February 20, 2015 at 7:28AM 
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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