cover image The Hunting Dogs

The Hunting Dogs

Jorn Lier Horst, trans. from the Norwegian by Anne Bruce. Sandstone (Dufour, dist.), $18 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-1-908737-63-2

Chief Insp. William Wisting started his career by solving the murder of Cecilia Linde, a girl who went missing and was found dead 12 days later. Seventeen years afterward, in Horst’s engaging third mystery featuring the Norwegian policeman to be published in English (after Closed for Winter), the media accuse Wisting of planting a cigarette butt with DNA evidence at the crime scene in the Cecilia case and failing to take the statement of a key witness. As the officer in charge, he is suspended pending review of the Bureau for Investigative Police Affairs. Wisting’s daughter, Line, an investigative journalist in Oslo and one of several well-drawn characters, helps her father try to uncover who tampered with the evidence—and to determine whether Cecilia’s convicted killer, Rudolf Haglund, who is now out on parole pending review of the tainted evidence, was, in fact, guilty. A recent unsolved murder and another young girl’s disappearance heighten the suspense. (Oct.)