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Product Description
Review
"I always eagerly await a new novel from Karin Fossum."
— Ruth Rendell
— Ruth Rendell
Product Description
One mild summer evening Lily and her husband are enjoying a meal while their baby daughter sleeps peacefully in her pram beneath a maple tree. But when Lily steps outside she is paralysed with terror. The child is bathed in blood.
Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet the family. Mercifully the baby is unharmed, but her parents are deeply shaken. Sejer spends the evening trying to comprehend why anyone would carry out such a sinister prank.
Then, just before midnight, somebody rings his doorbell. The corridor is empty, but the caller has left a small grey envelope on the mat. From his living room window, the inspector watches a figure slip across the car park and disappear into the darkness. Inside the envelope Sejer finds a postcard bearing a short message. Hell begins now.
Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet the family. Mercifully the baby is unharmed, but her parents are deeply shaken. Sejer spends the evening trying to comprehend why anyone would carry out such a sinister prank.
Then, just before midnight, somebody rings his doorbell. The corridor is empty, but the caller has left a small grey envelope on the mat. From his living room window, the inspector watches a figure slip across the car park and disappear into the darkness. Inside the envelope Sejer finds a postcard bearing a short message. Hell begins now.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Caller,
By
This review is from: The Caller (Paperback)
Lucy thought she had everything a woman could want [and who could disagree]: youth, beauty, health, a loving husband, and a baby girl they both doted upon. Until the warm summer day when evil is suddenly visited upon her perfect life in the form of an unknown monster, for when Lily approaches the pram under the maple tree outside their house where the baby had lain sleeping, she discovers that the baby is covered in blood. In their terror and panic, they rush to the hospital, where they are soon told that the baby is unharmed, that the blood was not hers, and that the police have been called. The Inspectors assigned to the case are Konrad Sejer and Jacob Skarre. Later that same night, a postcard is delivered to Sejer's door reading 'Hell begins now.'Happy people content with their lives, suddenly made anxious, unable any longer to feel secure, as 'a soundless form of terror' and utter vulnerability spreads through the community. This is the story line of this newest in the Inspector Sejer Mysteries. And a gripping, albeit somewhat depressing, tale it is, with a perpetrator who fancies himself as invincible, with unimaginable cruelty and an almost equally twisted quirk: He needs to see for himself the effects of his pranks: 'Everyone lives on an edge, he thought, and I will push them over.' The writing is wonderful, as one has come to expect of this author. She describes Sejer's dog as follows: 'a Chinese Shar Pei called Frank, lay at his feet, and was, like most Chinese, dignified, unapproachable and patient. Frank had tiny, closed ears ' and thus bad hearing ' and a mass of grey, wrinkled skin that made him look like a chamois cloth,' and someone's 'cat [which] slept in a corner, fat and striped like a mackerel.' The humans are just as well-drawn. Widowed at a young age, Sejer is now feeling the frailty of impending old age, and along with him the reader feels a palpable sense of inescapable mortality, as well as 'what was raw and brutal in the heart of every living creature.' A disturbing but ultimately thoroughly enjoyable novel, very fast reading, and highly recommended.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews) 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Back on track,
By Stephen McHenry - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Caller (Paperback)
My wife and I are both Karin Fossum fans and both felt she had dropped a bit with the last few books but with The Caller she is back on track and in Fossum form. If you have not read any of the work of this author, who is listed as one of the top 50 greatest crime writers by the British newspaper The Times, then start with The Indian Bride. If you are a Fossum fan already this will be a welcome read in the Inspector Sejer series. Fossum is strong on drawing characters and their lives and in this book she is working how lives can become tragically affected by incidents that are seemingly minor. Or so it begins. There is a Fossum-style twist ending; altogether a satisfying read for a Fossum fan. If you haven't sampled her before don't start with this one, start with Don't Look Back, or When the Devil Holds the Candle, or my favorite The Indian Bride. this particular book is a 2011 edition from a British publisher: I have seen in the past some of her books are then translated again into American English and published state-side, sometimes with a different title(.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Troubles,
By Stephen T. Hopkins - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Caller (Paperback)
Karin Fossum continues her entertaining Inspector Sejer mystery series with a novel titled, The Caller. Fossum takes an ordinary situation, injects it with danger and crime, and then allows multiple perspectives to envelop the reader. In this novel, we see the situation from the criminal's perspective, the victims, and the detectives. While we learn early who the criminal is, interest remains strong because of the skilled character development and the ways in which Inspector Sejer deals with the pieces of information he grasps. A twist at the end brings added pleasure to mystery fans. Fossum's a skilled writer and this novel will provide rich entertainment to those readers who like this genre, even in translation.Rating: Three-star (Recommended) 0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good thriller,
By Lakis Fourouklas - Published on Amazon.com
Karin Fossum is an author from Norway whom I've discovered only recently, so this is just the second of her books that I've come to read. The first one was Bad Intentions which I whole-heartily recommend to all crime fiction aficionados.The events of this book, in which the main protagonists are the usual suspects inspectors Sejer and Skarre, take place in a small provincial town in Norway. It all begins when somebody spills blood on a baby girl who sleeps in her pram beneath a tree in the yard, and thus gives the parents the scare of their lives, since at first they think that their kid is bleeding to death. Sejer is called to investigate the case, which at the beginning seems no more than an ill-humored prank. However at that very same night he receives a postcard with just a few words on it, according to which: Hell begins now. And it does, as during the next few days a series of unfortunate events, sometimes funny but mostly scary, will take place, which will spread a vale of terror over the town: A man will find his sheep dyed orange, a woman will read her obituary in the newspaper, and another one will receive a phone call which will make her rush to the hospital to visit her badly injured in a traffic accident daughter, who's not there. As the incidents increase day by day and the people get all the more scared, inspectors Sejer and Skarre do their best to discover who's behind these actions. However that will not prove so easy because, even though the perp seems to be a psychologically disturbed person, he's also highly intelligent and able to function well under pressure. The closer they get to him the better Sejer will come to understand his way of thinking. However as the perp will feel the breath of the law on his back, he will not feel scared. Instead he will decide to move ahead with his plans; plans that will make his past actions look nothing more than child's play. Once again the author puts too much weight on the inner world of her heroes; she describes their way of thinking and their troubled psyches, and thus delivers a book that can be read not only as a crime fiction novel but also as a sociological-psychological commentary. |
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