The nail embedded in his chest proves it wasn't suicide. But when the police go to his flat, a further puzzle awaits: a four-year-old boy has been left there. He doesn't seem to have any link with the victim, his parents cannot be found, and his drawings show he witnessed something terrible.
As detective Huldar hunts the killer, and child psychologist Freyja looks for the boy's parents, the mystery unfolds: a story of violence, entitlement, and revenge.
Comment: This is another book from the library, which I brought by impulse. I also had no idea it was part of a series and, it turns out, it's book #4. Well, I don't feel I lost much by not having read the others, for the plot feels independent from other situations.
In this story, we follow police officer Huldar and children's social assistant and psychologist Freyja as they apparently meet again in yet another case. This time, a little boy was found at the house of a man who was found dead. The little boy is only 4 years old and can't explain how he got there and where he does live, but as the police investigates the dead man, found hanged at a beach, it seems there are several connecting dots, but how exactly? Where are the child's parents? Hoe did they know the dead man? Could it be the man's killer might be looking for the boy?
This is one of those situations in which I had no expectation whatsoever. I knew this would be a mystery and that it had been written by an Iceland author but nothing more than that. Only now did I learn this is part of a series featuring police investigation with cases that somehow include children's presences. I have also noticed some friends who read more thrillers/mysteries than me have read the series and liked it, and this gave me motivation.
Although it's not my first attempt at trying a Nordic author, it was my fist approach to Yrsa Sigurdardottir and with this first sample, I think I might try her again, for the story was objective, without unnecessary fluff nor continuous red herrings, and the plot concise. I liked the style and I think it suited this fast paced story. I mean, it's not that the plot takes place in a short period of time, but things develop in a way that it feels something is always ongoing, which helps to keep the interest.
The plot is captivating, always some kind of hint is being given to let us be aware something else will happen/be shared soon. The man who was killed seems to be part of a small group of friends and they have been doing something clearly illegal or frown upon because they have videos they only share among each other in the dark web or something. I think the content of the videos is rather obvious from the start, but the question I had was why would they bother, which is also ridiculously obvious but how did this play out with the rest of the plot and the small child, was the real secret.
To be fair, I think the twist at the end was quite ingenious and well planned by the author, very clever indeed, but the process until that very moment where we learn why was a little vague. The dead man and his friends who made the videos felt almost like a second thought to the big plan and I still can't fully understand why the friends had to behave that way, but it did lead the police, ad us the reader, to where we had to, so.... I suppose it all "ends" well, but it wasn't smoothly done.
The connection between the dead man, the child and even the way the police investigation happens is very clever, like I said, and proves we are all way closer than what we think and sometimes one small detail can make the whole difference. Still, the why is very clever, some details too, but how the final piece of the puzzle is discovered by the police felt extremely forced. I have the feeling the author had this main idea and wanted to take things in a certain way but the small steps uniting this and that failed a little.
It is true that I kept being interested and I wanted to know what happened next. I can't say the characters were as amazing as that, though. Huldar and Freyja have common cases between them from the past books I assume, and two or three references to secondary characters make it clear that other things had happened before but I didn't feel overwhelmed by these facts, knowing this didn't ruin my reading experience with this book. The main characters are still a little superficial to me, as if they a work in progress and, as often happens in similar books in the genre, they are not really the key element.
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