Faithless

Set in Oslo, Norway, Faithless sees the return of detectives Gunnarstranda and Frølich. This police procedural follows the team as they investigate a murder and a missing person cold case. The two cases are not in any way connected which felt a little strange as I kept expecting something to connect them.

The police team is a motley crew much as you would expect of a team in real life but while they were all well-drawn characters I didn't get a sense of them working well together, perhaps because there were too many strong characters. The story is well- written and comes together well, with no loose ends at all. There is violence but very little of it is graphic, mostly it is implicit.

My only issue was with the translation by Don Bartlett, which I felt was not very well done and that made it quite difficult to read. It seemed to translate literally a lot of the time, as an example, in English we would say black dog but translated literally from many languages this would be “dog black” and the overall effect created confusing sentences.

It is quite a short story, with short chapters, snappy dialogue and plenty witty one liners. This is part of a series but the story works well as a standalone although it would probably be more enjoyable if you are familiar with the characters beforehand.

Despite my issues with translation I still enjoyed it and would read more of the author’s work. I would recommend this for any Scandi crime fans but I think anyone who enjoys a police procedural from any country would also enjoy it.