Black Seconds

[sawyl]

Again, following the UK publication order, I'm hopping back slightly to Karin Fossum's Black Seconds. Despite some similarities with The Water's Edge — both books feature disappearing children — the tone and approach feel quite different.

A girl goes out on her bike and never comes back, vanishing into thin air somewhere between home and her local shops. After the girl's mother and aunt fail to find her after a cursory search, the police arrive and start combing the area with little success. Does Emil Johannes Mork, a local man who is almost completely mute, know something about the disappearance? Why is the girl's cousin quite so worried about his car? And what does it have to do with his dodgy, drug dealing friend Willy?

Unlike The Water's Edge where the fate of the first victim is revealed in the second chapter, here knowledge is held back (although hints are supplied) until the main characters have been established in all their eccentricities. Emil, in particular is an especially fine creation. Despite having withdrawn so completely from the world that he is unable to say anything other that the word "no", he is shown as having a rich internal life that belies his lack of language skills, and on the one occasion when actually has something he wants to say his frustration, when he realises that he's completely incapable of expressing himself verbally, is acute. Of the other characters Ruth Rix, the missing girl, feels authentically stressed out, torn as she is between her desire to force her son Tomme to break off his friendship with Willy and the knowledge that at 18, he should be free to make his own decisions; while Tomme, despite being a point of view character, is just as elusive and opaque to reader as he is to his mother.