A young man named Jon Moreno drowns in a frigid lake. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Was I supposed to care?
My thoughts
It was murder, and the weird thing about this book is that the reader knows it from the get-go, making this not so much a whodunit as a whydunit. This slim mystery took its sweet time meandering to the answer, and when it came it left me wondering, "that's ... it?".
I've never read a mystery novel like this before. It's billed as "Inspector Sejer #9," but the good inspector is merely a periphery figure. He shows up on the crime scene long enough to form the suspicion that Jon's friends, Axel and Philip, may have something to hide, but then he disappears and the main action (if you can call it that) unfolds mostly from their points of view.
Steig Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series made Scandinavia seem utterly depraved, but this book left me with the opposite impression. Bad Intentions was probably the tamest mystery I've ever read. Maybe I should have started at the beginning of the series so that I would have gotten to know Inspector Sejer and appreciated his brief cameos in this book.
Bottom line
A quick read but there are better mysteries.
Fine print
Bad Intentions, by Karin Fossum
Genre: mystery
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.
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