I received this book from TripFiction.com .

Disappointing     

My Rating:  1 out of 5

Set in Norway this crime novel starts with Varg Veum sitting beside his dying girlfriend, and then travels back to the events leading up to that moment.

Varg is a private investigator hired to investigate the disappearance of Mons Maeland – a land owner and industrial developer (though it says on the back of the book that he is a wind-farm inspector).   The start is a little vague and confusing – or mysterious, depending on your point of view.  There are family conflicts and another unexplained death/disappearance in the past.  For the first third of the book Varg meets with various people enquiring about the whereabouts of Maeland, during which the wind and rain swept landscapes of Norway are well described.

After reading a third of the book I gave up with it.  The novel has received great reviews from others, so maybe I gave up too soon.  Despite interesting themes of wind farms, family conflict, crime etc. it wasn’t holding my attention.  It would have been helpful if I had written down the names of all the characters (there are not too many), rather than just the main protagonists;  that would have saved a lot of flicking back to remind myself who people are.

This is the first book I have read by Gunnar Staalesen; perhaps I should have started with another of his novels.