The Frozen Woman

Starred review from February 26, 2018
Jo Nesbø fans will welcome this pithy chronicle of crime and retribution from Michelet (Orion’s Belt). One February day, Vilhelm Thygesen, a crusty 63-year-old leftist alcoholic ex-cop and murderer, finds a brutally slashed woman’s frozen body in his garden. Two chief inspectors from Norway’s National Crime Bureau, Arve Stribolt and Vanya Vaage, conclude that the woman was a drug courier from Eastern Europe. Stribolt and Vaage also investigate the apparently accidental death of a motorcyclist belonging to a biker gang who has a link to Thygesen. A connection between the members of the biker gang, who are looking to expand their drug-smuggling operation, and the dead woman eventually emerges. Michelet’s trenchant characterizations, often bitterly ironic, open up a bleak Norwegian panorama of personal, professional, and cultural failings, leavened only by sporadic flashes of humanity.