Bad Intentions - Karin Fossum

[Luanne Ollivier]

Karin Fossum is new to me author and another Nordic author who has made her name known in North America.

Bad Intentions is the ninth offering in her Inspector Konrad Sejer series.  The book opens with three friends spending a weekend at a cabin. Their interactions seem odd and tainted by an alluded to event in the past. The weekend ends with one of them dead. Inspector Sejer and his partner Inspector Jakob Skarre are called in. The victim Jon Moreno had been hospitalized for depression and was out on a weekend pass with his friends. The friends insist he must have been suicidal, but Jon's new girlfriend doesn't agree.

I found Fossum's writing to be very stark, spare  and almost bleak. Not in a bad way though. It was just a very different take on a crime novel. There weren't long graphic descriptions of the crime. Instead Fossum focuses on the characters, their inner thoughts and psyches,  and she does it very, very well. The thought processes of the two friends left alive are the quite frightening part of this book. The event in the past that has affected the lives of these three young men is slowly revealed - I was eager to see what it was.

I appreciated the banter between Sejer and Skarre, but felt I didn't really come to know them in this slim novel. They are protagonists I would like to know better - I would pick up another book by Karin Fossum without hesitation.

Read an excerpt of Bad Intentions.