Inspector Sejer
13 total works
A mother and child are found dead in an old caravan on a remote piece of land. There is a bloody footprint at the scene.
Meanwhile, another mother confesses to her son that he is adopted. The man who abandoned them, now the focus of the boy's obsession, is not his real father.
Chief Inspector Sejer is tasked with investigating the murder – and soon receives important information about the two families...
One mild summer evening Lily and her husband are enjoying a meal while their baby daughter sleeps peacefully in her pram beneath a maple tree. But when Lily steps outside she is paralysed with terror. The child is bathed in blood.
Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet the family. Mercifully, the baby is unharmed, but her parents are deeply shaken, and Sejer spends the evening trying to comprehend why anyone would carry out such a sinister prank. Then, just before midnight, somebody rings his doorbell.
The corridor is empty, but the caller has left a small grey envelope on the mat. From his living room window, the inspector watches a figure slip across the car park and disappear into the darkness. Inside the envelope Sejer finds a postcard bearing a short message: Hell begins now.
‘He'd just learnt to walk,’ she said. ‘He was sitting playing on his blanket, then all of a sudden he was gone.’
A 16-month-old boy is found drowned in a pond right by his home. Chief Inspector Sejer is called to the scene as there is something troubling about the mother’s story. As even her own family turns against her, Sejer is determined to get to the truth.
Eva is walking by the river with her seven-year-old daughter when they catch sight of a man’s body in the water. Eva tells her daughter to wait while she calls the police, but when she reaches the phone box she doesn’t call them. Instead she phones her father, and makes no mention of her discovery.
When the body is eventually found, it soon becomes clear to Inspector Sejer and his team that this was no accidental drowning – the man was the victim of a very violent killer. But the trail has gone cold. Until, one night, Eva receives a phone call...
Read the stunning, psychologically acute new thriller from the Queen of Norwegian crime fiction.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE PETRONA AWARD 2019**
Ragna Riegel works in a supermarket and still lives in her childhood home. She's alone in the world since her only son moved to Berlin. She longs for a Christmas or birthday card from him.
Ragna lives her life within strict self-imposed limits: she sits in the same seat on the bus every day, on her way to her predictable job. On her way home she always visits the same local shop. She feels safe in her routine, until one day she receives a letter with a threatening message scrawled in capital letters. An unknown enemy has entered her world and she must use all her means to defend herself.
When the worst happens, Inspector Konrad Sejer is called in to interrogate Ragna. Is this unassuming woman out of her depth, or is she hiding a dark secret?
‘The final page will make your jaw drop and your heart stop’ Evening Standard
‘Exemplary… the suspense is maintained with a sure touch’ Guardian
But in a novel that will keep you desperate to turn each new page to find out more, Fossum brilliantly ensures that things are rarely as they would at first appear. From the deeply sympathetic policeman to the social outcast of Errki and the bank robber thoroughly unsuited to his profession, Fossum writes from within the minds of her characters with great lucidity...but she never gives too much away.
There is no reason for Sejer and his colleague Skarre to see a connection between the infant's death and the reported disappearance of a town trouble-maker. With Zipp too frightened to come forward, the police must wait for the evidence to present itself before they can begin to comprehend the unsettling nature of the case on their hands.