![]() ![]() ![]() We start with zero knowledge, but as the book progresses, Juul helpfully fills in some of the gaps. Over the next 150 pages, the reader is carefully inducted into Bess' world, and a most confusing one it is too. If she didn't kill her partner, then who did? Where are his phone and laptop? And, perhaps most importantly, how does she actually feel about his death? Once the initial shock has died down however, Bess is left to answer a few difficult questions. The fact that the man is not a policeman - and that Bess is not actually married to the recently departed Halland - takes something away from this rather dramatic announcement. ![]() The first Bess (and the reader) learns about the murder is when a local man knocks on her door and blurts out that he is arresting her for the murder of her husband. Given the title of the novel, it is hardly surprising that his appearance in the book is a rather brief one - within a matter of pages, poor Halland is found gunned down in the street outside his house. The novel is told through the eyes of Bess, a forty-something divorcée who left her husband a decade ago for the enigmatic Halland, a wealthy, hard-working older man. ***** Pia Juul's The Murder of Halland (translated by Martin Aitken) is a dark, deliberately confusing, literary crime novel, a welcome twist on the wave of Scandinavian detective fiction which has recently been invading our shores. ![]()
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