sawyl | He Who Fears the Wolf (Reply)

Next in the current bout of intensive reading: the dark, intense He Who Fears the Wolf, the second (in UK publication order) of Karin Fossum's Konrad Sejer novels.

When a widow is killed on her doorstep in a particularly gruesome fashion — stabbed through the eye with a hoe — the locals quickly come to suspect escaped mental patient Errki Johrma. When the city police, in the form of Jacob Skarre, are called in, they find Errki vanished, their chief witness unreliable, and the forensic evidence maddeningly inconsistent. The break in the case comes early when a chance encounter between the rural policeman who discovered the murder and Konrad Sejer, working on strange armed robbery turned kidnapping, reveals the whereabouts of Errki Johrma. With this established, the rest of the novel alternates between an investigation of Errki's background and mental state, and the police attempts to solve the murder and track down their missing suspect.

Unlike it's immediate predecessor He Who Fears the Wolf isn't so much a procedural as a psychological investigation into Errki's state of mind, his local notoriety, and the factors the drive otherwise normal people to commit crime. The dynamic between Errki and his confessor is particularly well done, especially the way that Morton's constant pressure combined with his proximity allows him to get closer to the source of Errki's problems than the psychologists at the Beacon Hospital. The central murder mystery works well, moving from the simple initial hypothesis to a more complex and more satisfyingly unpleasant conclusion when the facts finally come out.