Norwegian author GunnarStaalesen just entered his seventies, and his crime novels date back to when he
was 22. Still, he’s not well known in the US because of the lag in translation.
Fortunately, for his best-selling series featuring Bergen private investigator
Varg Veum, that’s changing. BIG SISTER
(originally published in 2016) is the sixth in this series that Don Bartlett
has translated, with an easy-to-enjoy casual feel to the writing, and just
enough “foreignness” on the tongue to appreciate the Scandinavian backdrop.
Big Sister
is not a standard Nordic noir—Varg Veum’s darkest years are done, and he’s
settled happily into a long-term relationship with stable lady friend, and a
caring if somewhat distant one with his son. He’s not hitting the bottle or any
other form of mind-numbing substance. But the opening of the book proves he
still has secrets in his own past, or more precisely that of his family, to
cope with: The woman arriving at his
office, Norma Johanne Bakkevik, introduces herself as the elderly half-sister
he’s never met (she was adopted long before his birth), and wants to be his
client in the disappearance of a college student.
Veum’s baffled by the
presentation of the case: Nineteen-year-old Emma Hagland, a good student and
quiet person, and Norma’s goddaughter, walked out of the apartment she shared
with two other young women, and simply vanished. Nobody’s heard from her since.
And the police, understandably, decline to take action, since college students
are all too likely to move in with boyfriends, relocate due to quarrels, quit
school and go on extended vacations, you name it.
Varg’s inclined to that
opinion at first, too. But there are a lot of missing or damaged parents in
this set-up, including young Emma’s estranged dad, who turns out to be part of
a not very pleasant motorcycle club closer to Varg’s own locale. He can’t help
noticing the pattern of upheaval and hurt as he investigates (he’s a PI with
pretty good police connections).
Most disturbing of all is Veum’s
visit to a woman named simply Veslemøy—no surname in use—who’s grown up well
cared for in a mental institution and remains almost catatonic, and certainly
speechless. This condition followed a long-ago sexual assault on Veslemøy—an
assault blamed on the missing teen’s long-gone father, who still associates
with a pair of brutal men from those years, leaders of the dangerous motorcycle
club.
There’s no big payday likely
for Veum in solving this case, if in fact Emma is truly missing. Even worse,
the cold case around Veslemøy becomes an obsession for him. Somehow, he’s sure,
Emma’s disappearance must connect to this profound disturbance in her family’s
past. Veum considers the landscape around Emma herself to be distressingly vague:
I stared into space. I still didn’t have a distinct picture of Emma, but it was beginning to resemble a kind of profile, a bit blurred at the edges, but clear enough for me to see a vulnerable young woman, someone it might be easy to lead astray, someone who was open to approaches, whether well meant or malevolent, someone who could easily become a victim.
This worried me and created a sense of urgency. Perhaps I would have to resort to a few short-cuts, however brutal they might seem to outsiders—or to those concerned.
Veum’s short-cuts take him
into confronting a brutality that threatens his life, repeatedly, but that’s
not a new experience. Staalesen solves those moments with some “deus ex machina”
moves that detract from the emotional power of Veum’s hunt for Emma and his
dark plunge into the deadly side of social media. But this minor flaw doesn’t
stop the force of the book, and the search for both Veum’s truth and Emma’s
makes a fiercely good crime novel, with an unexpected but satisfying final
twist.
Despite the Norwegian PI
slant, BIG SISTER is far from the
darkness of Henning Mankell or Karin Fossom. Consider it a traditional sleuth
mystery, with plenty of nontraditional options added. Well worth reading, with
the rest of Staalesen’s award-winning series.
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