Mystery and Crime · Hardback

The Mist Murder

Norwegian title: Tåkemordet

Hans Olav Lahlum

The Mist Murder has, in the Sherlockian spirit of Hans Olav Lahlum, a subtle plot in a fashionable seventies colour palette with links to a long-unsolved murder.

“Firstly, I owe it to you to let you know that I was a national socialist during the war,” said the man sitting in the guest chair in my office.

The date is 16 November 1973. In his office in Oslo, private investigator K2 is sought out by a farmer who has travelled all the way from Telemark. The client says that for important personal reasons he needs to clear up the circumstances surrounding his brother’s dramatic death in the late autumn of 1943. The private investigator allows himself to be tempted by this lucrative challenge and travels to Telemark the same evening. There, he stays in the house where his client’s older brother, a front fighter recently returned home, was found shot one misty autumn day thirty years previously.

The house, the client and his family history make a fascinating and sometimes unsettling impression. In the strange local community, K2 discovers that events from the war years still cast long shadows over the lives of both young and older people. Patricia is far away at home in Oslo, but K2 soon realises that he will need her help to clear up an old murder mystery that he is finding increasingly confusing and disturbing…