One afternoon after school, nine-year-old Emilie doesn't come home. Her father finds the backpack from her late mother, that would never be abandoned willingly. A week later, a five-year-old boy goes missing. And then another child.
Meanwhile, Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler with a troubled past and a difficult young daughter, tries to overturn a decades-old false murder conviction. Police Commissioner Stubo lost his wife and daughter, has only his grandson left, and needs to solve the case. Johanna resists helping until the bodies return to their homes with notes "You got what you deserved".
Punishment, Anne Holt
PUNISHMENT is the first in a newly translated, extremely successful series in Europe, featuring academic and former FBI profiler Johanne Vik and Detective Inspector Adam Stubo of the Oslo police.
When 9 year old Emilie goes missing her father is worried but not frantic. She'd done this once before just after her mother died. This time, they don't find her. When a little boy disappears and ultimately is returned to his parents; dead, no obvious cause of death, and a handwritten note: You Got What You Deserved; Oslo starts to worry.
Police Superintendent Adam Stubo, working the case, turns to former FBI profiler Johanne Vik for help. Johanne is already looking into the conviction of Aksel Seier for the rape and murder of a young child many years ago. An old lady really wants to know if Seier was guilty or not. Johanne is not confident that she can help Adam, but he is increasingly desperate for any sort of lead that the Police can get. He and his team make very little progress and they soon have 3 abducted children, two dead and a chance that Emilie is still alive.
The story shifts focus between the search for the current child killer in Oslo to Johanne's search for information about Seier's case. At the same time Adam is increasingly leaning on Johanne for assistance in the case and for human contact. Adam's own wife and daughter have died. Johanne has a disabled daughter she struggles to manage on occasion, and an ex-husband who would be happy to take full custody of their daughter.
Whilst both of the cases slowly gather some pace, the central part of the story concentrates on the increasing involvement of Johanne and Adam. It's not a romantic involvement as such, but there is a feeling of interest and reliance from both of them.
There are a couple of hints in this book that indicate a first time novel. There is a tendency towards over-development and over-explanation of characters, and at points this concentration takes away from the pace and focus you would expect from a current day serial killer investigation. The resolution was also over reliant on some coincidences which certainly added to the thriller side of the story, but perhaps over-egged the pudding slightly.
Neither of these minor quibbles ultimately take much away from the book, and the central character of Adam Stubo is a really interesting, sympathetic and intuitive Police Detective.
Punishment, Anne Holt
The first of the Johanne Vik & Adam Stubø books, PUNISHMENT, is now available in paperback locally. An excellent crime fiction series by Norwegian author Anne Holt, this has been a series that could be (well had to be) read out of order. Now there's something compelling about being able to go back to the start, and work your way through.
Originally read by this reviewer back in 2007, when it was newly translated, PUNISHMENT is the novel that introduces an unusual investigative (ultimately personal) coupling of academic and former FBI profiler Johanne Vik and Detective Inspector Adam Stubø of the Oslo police.
As summarised in my earlier review:
"When 9 year old Emilie goes missing her father is worried but not frantic. She'd done this once before just after her mother died. This time, they don't find her. When a little boy disappears and ultimately is returned to his parents; dead, no obvious cause of death, and a handwritten note: You Got What You Deserved; Oslo starts to worry.
Police Superintendent Adam Stubø, working the case, turns to former FBI profiler Johanne Vik for help. Johanne is already looking into the conviction of Aksel Seier for the rape and murder of a young child many years ago. An old lady really wants to know if Seier was guilty or not. Johanne is not confident that she can help Adam, but he is increasingly desperate for any sort of lead that the Police can get. He and his team make very little progress and they soon have 3 abducted children, two dead and a chance that Emilie is still alive."
The focus of this novel moves between Oslo and that current case of a child killer, and the US and the cold case of Aksel Seier. The two central characters are each, in their own way, obsessed with their respective cases, and the complications that they bring. An odd message from the killer in the current day case, and a dying woman who wants the truth to be found before it's too late for her - and a man who has lived with the consequences of a child killing many years before. Woven into the story of these children and all of their dreadful deaths and the consequences of them, is the story of Vik's own daughter, who is intellectually disabled, and Stubø's own loss of his wife and daughter. Whilst there's no romantic attachment in this initial book, readers of subsequent novels in the series will know that something builds between these two main characters, as their professional involvement increases.
My main quibble at the time still stands - there is a tendency to concentrate on building the central characters quite a bit in PUNISHMENT. If we'd have been lucky enough to read this series translated in order then right from the start it was obvious there were plans for these two, and this initial novel is laying a lot of ground work. Which is a minor quibble in the overall scheme of things - possibly only noticeable because of the round about way in which we got a chance to read the series. Vik and Stubø are a great pairing though, and re-reading PUNISHMENT was an opportunity to remind myself of what a great series this is.