The Wolf by Samuel Bjørk

Good morning, readers! Today I'm super excited to be a stop on the Random Things tour for the latest in Samuel Bjørk's Munch and Krüger series, The Wolf!

As an aside, over a decade since I was introduced to this series with the amazing I'm Traveling Alone and to this day it remains one of my favorites!

The Wolf is actually a prequel to the existing series. It is the story that starts it all: Mia Krüger being recruited to Munch's team at the ripe old age of 21. Her dreams to be the first female Delta sidelined when she's approached with an offer that turns out to be too tantalizing to resist. 

Two boys have been murdered. Their bodies found in a bizarrely laid out scene with a dead fox placed between them. It mirrors a still unsolved case from Sweden with one exception: the animal there was a hare. 

As Munch and his team comb the growing crime scene as well as case files from outside of Norway, the head of the police academy flags Mia Krüger as a potential candidate Munch who might interest Munch. And while he's not looking to expand his team at the moment, Mia's skills of observation prove to be truly unique. After just forty minutes with the crime scene photos, she's made an observation everyone missed. 

Solving the case is anything but easy. No trace evidence at either scene, no connection between the victims in Sweden and Norway, and an eight-year gap between the crimes complicates things, to say the least. And yet, Munch's team is determined.

Bjørk, aka Frode Sander Øein, excels in creating dark and disturbing puzzles of plots for his characters to unravel. And he also excels in building fascinating and well-rounded characters. 

I've noted before that although this is commonly referred to as the Munch and Krüger series, it is in fact a larger cast of characters, all of whom get a careful amount of focus and build. (Though Munch and Krüger do take the spotlight.)

In the case of The Wolf, Bjørk even adds a bit of a forward that sent me on an internet search to see if it was in fact real, which is actually something I love. It means the author has done such a great job at putting together their story that it does feel as though it could be seated in reality!

I will warn you that this series is dark. And by dark I mean it probably needs ALL of the trigger warnings. But if you're a fan of Nordic Noir, this is truly one of the best series I can recommend!

To date there are actually five installments in the series. The fifth has only just released this year and has yet to be translated (so I don't have a title), but the reading order now is:

The Wolf

I'm Traveling Alone

The Owl Always Hunts at Night

The Boy in the Headlights

Book 5 

Feature: The Ice Coven by Max Seeck

Happy Book Birthday to Max Seeck whose second Jessica Niemi thriller, The Ice Coven is out today!

I was meant to be reviewing it today but LIFE got in the way of my reading. And since it hits shelves today and I want all of you to buy it, I'm going to do a feature instead :)

So here's a bit about the book from Goodreads:

Six months have passed since Jessica's encounter with the mysterious serial-killing coven of witches and the death of her mentor Erne. Her nightmares about her mother and the witchcraft that undid her have only gotten worse, but she's doing what she can to stay focused. Her homicide squad, now under new leadership, has been given a murder case and a new series of disappearances to investigate. A young woman's corpse has washed up on an icy beach, and two famous Instagram influencers have gone missing at the same time.

The missing influencers and the murdered woman all have ties to a sinister cult. Jessica finds an eerie painting--of a lighthouse on a frigid island--as she investigates and under the picture is a gruesome poem detailing a murder. The nightmares about her dead mother have intensified and seem all too real, making Jessica wonder if the woman might be trying to tell her something about the killings. And as Jessica works frantically to solve her latest case, her terrifying past and the coven of witches that almost killed her shockingly reemerge and threaten to destroy her.

So if it's not clear, you do need to read these in order! (You can check out my review of The Witch Hunter here, if you're interested.) 

This is Nordic Noir to a T and if you haven't yet taken the dive into that particular subgenre of crime fiction, I highly recommend that you rectify that ASAP! 

There's a unique style to Scandinavian crime fiction that I find so completely appealing. I think it's the ice and the snow and the odd sense of isolation even when the setting isn't necessarily isolated at all. 

All that's to say, Nordic Noir/Scandi Crime is some of my absolute favorite and I definitely want to see more crime fiction fans seeking it out :)

So yeah, run out and buy The Ice Coven today! And go ahead and get them both if you haven't started the series yet—you're going to want to read them back to back!

Order a copy from your favorite indie via Bookshop!

Social Distancing With Nordic Noir

Reading through the pandemic has been a challenge but I seem to have caught my stride by diving into the things I like to read the most, darker fiction. Horror, thrillers, dark sci fi, all of them have been serving well as distractions as we muddle our way through the current situation this year. 

I know this isn’t the case for all readers. Many are finding comfort in lighter reads. For me, darker fiction has always been my jam and one of my favorite genres is Nordic.

Nordic Noir is simply crime fiction set in Nordic countries (Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden). But any fan of these books can attest to the fact that there’s a definite aesthetic to the genre that sets it apart from crime fiction from other regions.

Nordic Noir is brutal. It’s gritty and dark and features some of the most twisted and depraved criminals I’ve ever seen in fiction. So it’s definitely not a genre for everybody. But it is a genre that has a huge fan base, so much so that there multiple festivals celebrating these books in various countries!

Henning Mankell is one of the most well known authors of the genre. His Kurt Wallander series made its way to the English language readers early on and was adapted into a Swedish film series and TV show as well as an English TV show starring Kenneth Branagh. But it was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo that really kicked the genre into the mainstream.

My own introductions were Kirsten Ekman's Blackwater and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Though the latter not considered true Nordic Noir, it is helmed as a predecessor to the trend. I don't recall much about Ekman's book at this stage. It was her first to be translated to English and I read it around 1996, so it's been a while. 

I recall more of Smilla's Sense of Snow thanks to having seen the movie so many times! In the book, a child falls off the roof of a building and dies but Smilla is convinced it wasn’t an accident. When no one listens, she decides to take matters into her own hands and investigate. It’s an odd read, but as a teenager I loved it and it opened the way to my reading more Nordic authors!

One of my longtime, current favorites is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Her Thóra Gudmundsdóttir is heavily inspired by actual events and history in Iceland and each book always has just a hint of the supernatural to it. One is even based on the Icelandic folklore around trolls! The first in the series, and the author’s debut, was Last Rituals, a book that finds Thóra, an attorney and single mother, aiding in the investigation of the murder of a college student.

Sigurðardóttir has recently kicked off a new series as well, this one featuring a psychologist. The first book is called The Legacy. I was lucky enough to be in Houston on the very day she was doing an event last fall and got to hear her speak!

As a longtime reader of mysteries and thrillers, it’s always a treat to find an author who can keep me guessing straight through to the end and Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen is one of those authors. His Department Q series is an absolute favorite of mine and features a grumpy detective relegated to sifting through cold cases thanks to his bad attitude. Unfortunately for the powers that be, Carl Mørck and his misfit cohorts prove to be better at their jobs than anyone expected. The Keeper of Lost Causes is the first book in the series and it is fabulous. Be warned, though, it is incredibly dark! (The movie adaptation is fabulous as well and I highly suggest seeking it out! There are actually movies based on the first four books, but the last one hasn't made it's way to the States as of yet, sadly.)

This year saw me reading my first Lars Kepler novels. These are penned by a husband and wife team. The series kicks off with The Hypnotist. If you read the blog often, then you've also seen my recent coverage of Ragnar Jónasson, Sara Blaedel, and Søren Sveistrup. Other well known and excellent authors in the genre include Jo Nesbø, Jenny Rogneby, and Camilla Läckberg amongst others.