Calling Out for You

[sawyl]

Another day, another book and following my current obsession with Karin Fossum, it's on to Calling Out for You, a murder mystery set in a small, rural village in Norway.

On the night that his new Indian wife is due to arrive, Gunder Jomann learns that his beloved sister Marie has been involved in a car crash that has left her in a coma. Torn between the hospital and the airport, he sends a local taxi driver to pick up his wife and remains by his sister's bedside. The taxi driver fails in his task and later in evening, the disfigured body of an Indian woman is found in a field close to the village. Called in to investigate the case, Konrad Sejer and Jacob Skarre find themselves faced with a shortage of forensic evidence, closed-mouthed locals, and an unreliable teenage witness with a crush on Skarre.

As with Fossum's other novels, the book features a lot of good character work. Gunder and his sister are an absolute delight: Marie, until her accident at least, is bustling and energetic despite the hints that her husband is rather distant; Gunder, despite having travelled to India specifically to find himself a wife, genuinely loves his new bride and wants nothing but the best for her even though he's often at a loss to know exactly what that is. The detectives, too, get a change to develop — Sejer faced with the possibility that his much loved dog might have a fatal illness and Skarre with the thought that he might have picked up a stalker.

Calling Out feels darker than its predecessors with only a very slight lifting of the veil at the very end. The murder seems to lack clean edges: everyone in the village seems to have something to hide; the evidence against the principal suspect is circumstantial and weak; and one of the primary witnesses gradually devolves into a damaged fantasist.