Blessed are Those Who Thirst [by] Anne Holt
978-1-4516-3478-5; $15.00
Oslo is extremely hot this year, and people are behaving badly, as they are wont to do in hot weather. And Hanne Wilhelmsen seems to be getting the brunt of the weather, in the form of too many cases for one person to deal with. Three of them, performed on three Saturday nights in a single month, are just crime scenes. There are no bodies, but there is a prodigious amount of blood on every surface, along with unknown numbers – 8 digits long.
It is finally discovered that these numbers are the case numbers of women who have come to Norway to seek asylum. A little boy digging in the dirt comes across the body of one of these women. His mother calls the police, and, they discover, the body is, indeed, a foreigner.
Another one of Hanne’s cases is of a smart, savvy, female medical student who is raped. She is seriously destroyed by this act, and her father is so sad because he feels he can’t do anything to help her. They grow more and more distant from one another, even though each is all that the other has.
Hanne is waiting for the other shoe to fall – why isn’t there another horrible death scene? Then, she realizes that the rape is actually one of the Saturday “killings” deferred. Instead of the gory splash happening one of the Saturdays, the rape happened instead. She and her team rush back to the building that the girl lived in, before she moved back home. There had been a foreign woman living in one of the apartments on a floor lower than the raped student, but she had disappeared. Hanne sends her troops out to find this woman.
Meanwhile, both the girl and her father have been setting groundwork for their revenge.
The foreign woman has gone to Lillehamar, where she is living in a boarding house, but the boarding house owner has reported that she is an illegal, and the police pick her up. She languishes in jail, unable to understand why she is there, and ashamed that she did something wrong, although she doesn’t know what. She is finally sent in a helicopter to Oslo, where she is encouraged to tell her story.
The story finally comes together as all of the cops, the rapee, and her father, end up together at the house of the rapist.
Somewhere in the middle of the story, the Chief Inspector keels over and dies in Hanne’s office. Life may be changing for Hanne, since many want her to apply for his job. Meanwhile, there is tension on the homefront between Hanne and her partner Cecelie, who is getting tired of being shoved into the background when Hanne’s police friends are around. Although Hanne had made an attempt to invite her partner Håken over for dinner, he cancels and she can breathe a sigh of relief. But, knowing it will have to come eventually, she offers a dinner invitation to her old motorcycle-riding cop friends, especially her dear friend Billy T. As things wind down, it finally rains.
Enjoyable police procedural, showing that it’s pretty much the same procedures everywhere, with excellent characters and good old-fashioned plotting. Highly recommended. ~ lss-r
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Library book.
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