When the Devil Holds the Candle by Karin Fossum

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"He slipped his arm around her waist and held on tight, lifting her from the chair. She squealed with glee, but he noted with satisfaction the tiny hint of panic as he carried her across the room."

Karin Fossum, one of my most favorite writers manages to surprise me in three different ways with her When the Devil Holds the Candle (1998). First of all, I am surprised that this is again not a great book, not even - I am afraid - a very good one. It is far below the level of Ms. Fossum's best work like her masterpiece Black Seconds and below the beautifully sad Indian Bride .

Further, the novel has surprised me in that I like the thread about Chief Inspector Sejer's personal life. I have never warmed to his persona, seemingly aloof and cold, but here the author humanizes the detective through the presence of his girlfriend. Also, the whole thread is quite well written: many scenes between Sejer and Sara ring true. Ms. Fossum does a great job writing about love between mature people - not an easy thing to do. One can even find a short passage that is quite erotically charged - I have never seen it before in the author's works even if I have read almost all her novels that have been translated into English.

Alas, the last surprise is again of an unpleasant kind. The partial solution of the mystery thread is based on a rather cheap literary device, used and abused by many authors before, authors not as talented as Ms. Fossum. The mystery thread also greatly stretches the bounds of plausibility but then one does not read this author's books for the mystery component but rather for the characters' psychology.

The mystery thread is based on the disappearance of a young man. An elderly woman accosts Sejer's assistant, Skarre, during his appearance in court. The woman - who cryptically tells Skarre that the missing person does not have long to live - seems confused and the detective even suspects mental illness. The rest of the novel alternates between four threads: an internal monologue of one of the central characters, a thread that focuses on adventures, some of criminal nature, of two young men, Andreas and Zipp. The third thread, a procedural one, follows the investigation, and the last one is the "love story" of Sejer and Sara. While the chronological order of events is not kept strict the author manages to build mystery and suspense.

Other than the sweet and well-written passages about the Sejer-Sara relationship the best thing in the novel is the character of Andreas. I find him a full-bodied person rather than a paper-thin template. Andreas "saunters through life" (a great phrase!) with no ambition, no interests, no enthusiasm for anything. As many other characters in the novel he carries a secret, which distorts his life.

I very much like the slight ambiguity of the ending since it validates my belief that no one ever knows what really is going on around them. A good, readable, engrossing novel, just not an extraordinary one.

Three and a quarter stars.



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