{"id":6608,"date":"2017-05-11T06:56:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T10:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6608"},"modified":"2017-05-11T06:56:56","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T10:56:56","slug":"the-owl-always-hunts-at-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6608","title":{"rendered":"****The Owl Always Hunts at Night"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Owl

photo: Jacob Spinks, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Samuel Bjork, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund \u2013 <\/strong>Bjork is yet another name to add to the pantheon of Nordic Noir authors<\/a>. In this second solidly written police procedural featuring Oslo detectives Holger Munch and Mia Kr\u00fcger, their strong working relationship continues, even as they themselves are at risk of breaking apart.<\/p>\n

Munch\u2014overweight and troubled by his failed marriage\u2014leads a team of detectives investigating the ritualistic murder of a teenage girl, whose naked body was found posed on a bed of owl feathers in a pentagram formed by the candles that surround her. The pathologist\u2019s report reveals she was strangled and highlights the grazing to her knees and elbows, the blisters on her hands, and her emaciated condition.<\/p>\n

This case is just too weird, and Munch reaches out to Kr\u00fcger, on leave from the department for mental health reasons. Short on emotional reserves and long on intuition, \u00a0Kr\u00fcger is considered practically a genius at penetrating the murky depths of a case. Though Kr\u00fcger agrees to help with the investigation, she\u2019s fighting a battle she may not win with alcohol and pills and the overwhelming desire to follow her parents and twin sister to the grave. Mia Moonbeam, as she\u2019s nicknamed, has a dreamy quality to her thinking, that sharpens to a point whenever she focuses on a detail of the case.<\/p>\n

Munch\u2019s involvement in the lives of his daughter\u2014a single mom who may have found a new love\u2014and six-year-old granddaughter periodically brings him in painful contact with his ex-wife. One minor confusion in the book (series?), which Bjork could easily have avoided, was naming the ex-wife, daughter, and granddaughter Marianne, Miriam, and Marion.<\/p>\n

The dead teenager, Camilla Green, had gone missing from a group home for troubled teens. In this multiple point-of-view novel, you see some of the other girls in action and know they are hiding important information\u2014information that may put one of them at risk too.<\/p>\n

At the book\u2019s end, a few threads remain untied, and I don\u2019t understand why the detectives used a character\u2019s cell phone records\u2014not passport control information\u2014to establish whether he was out of the country, when those data indicate only where the phone was. The book\u2019s setting and atmospherics were utterly convincing, though if you\u2019re tired of the torture-of-beautiful-young-women trope, beware.<\/p>\n

What you can easily envision is Munch\u2019s daughter\u2019s attraction to Ziggy, the new man in her life. He\u2019s part of an animal rights action group that involves her longtime friend Julia and others, and the fact that he turns out to be super-rich is a pleasant bonus. But, suspicious you, you have your doubts.<\/p>\n

A longer version of this review appeared on crimefictionlover.com<\/a>, and the affiliate link is below. I received an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Samuel Bjork, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund \u2013 Bjork is yet another name to add to the pantheon of Nordic Noir authors. In this second solidly written police procedural featuring Oslo detectives Holger Munch and Mia Kr\u00fcger, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****The Owl Always Hunts at Night - Scandinavian thriller complete with mayhem and gloom","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,40,126,32],"tags":[678,1005,1004,1006],"class_list":["post-6608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-murder","tag-samuel-bjork","tag-scandinavian-crime","tag-the-owl-always-hunts-at-night"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1IA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6610,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6608\/revisions\/6610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}