1222 (2007)

This book had alot of potential but fell a bit flat for me. A thriller set in a legendary snowstorm in Norway where survivors from a train crash begin to dwindle in numbers and the snow rages outside. Anticlimactic and not enough payoff at the end. ( )

So you're on a train in Norway in the winter, heading north through a blizzard when the train derails. There is bad news and good news. The bad news is that you're in Norway in a blizzard in a wrecked train. The good news is that only one person has been killed in the accident and, miraculously, you're very near a large resort hotel that is able to accommodate everyone in comfort while you're waiting out the storm.

People are people, though, so not everybody focuses on the positive. Cliques immediately form in the hotel and hostilities erupt when an ultra-nationalist woman named Kari Thue hurls epithets against a Kurdish couple, and some young people are nasty to a member of a church group. Observing it all with her (retired) police detective's eye is Hanne Wilhelmsen. Hanne is in a wheelchair, having been shot and paralyzed on the job.

Soon, guests begin being murdered and Hanne is dragged, figuratively kicking and screaming, into an investigation. The storm rages and intensifies outside, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a Golden Age locked-room mystery.

Hanne's irascible character is appealing, the setup for this mystery is well executed and the other players vividly portrayed. But, after a strong start, the story bogs down and just plods along. In classic Golden Age style, the tale closes with all the suspects gathered together so that our detective can dazzle us with her deductive skills and dramatically reveal the murderer. Unfortunately, in this book, that scene lacks the drama and deductive sparkle of Golden Age reveal. It just . . . happens.

A disappointment.

DISCLOSURE: I received a free review copy of this book. ( )

First, a caveat. I don't read much crime fiction, nor watch a great deal of it on TV, and this was the first modern crime novel I'd read in over 15 years. I came to it because of my interest in Nordic culture; it was on a university Scandinavian Studies reading list that had been posted online, I liked the sound of the character and the story didn't sound too gruesome.

It certainly won on the last count; it was quite old fashioned in not dwelling on gory details and whilst there was always ample suspense and something happening, I never felt nervous (despite reading the first 2/3 of it on trains in winter).

There was an interesting cast of characters, seemingly not stereotyped, but not particularly well fleshed out - but then that works fine because if you're stuck with about a hundred people for a few days, you don't get to know many of them that well.

I really like Hanne Wilhelmsen as a character and her mentions of sometimes being in pain and her frustration at not feeling as sharp as she had in the past struck a great chord with me. It was also rather refreshing as nearly all fictional detectives are so effortless in their powers. A first person narrative by a grumpy misanthrope who is forced to engage with people but approaches this in a mature fashion was also a new one on me as far as fiction is concerned.

She could seem like a political correctness stereotype, being a disabled lesbian in a relationship with a muslim, but to me someone in such a situation could easily be a friend of a friend. So that makes her closer to my world, as well as more original, than the average 50-something whisky swilling divorced male DCI character.

Her placement in the situation seemed uncontrived as she was marooned with the group and this was the first time she'd engaged in investigation since retiring from the police years earlier following injury. But, even considering Norway is a small country, there were rather silly numbers of coincidences in people from the train knowing one another previously. The Agatha Christie style denouement was more hommage than an endeavour towards something approximating realism, and it felt a little disjointed in context.

And - this is probably a translator's error - I would be surprised if someone with a child would ever refer to a baby as "it" after being told what gender it was.

The book left me wanting to read one of the earlier Hanne Wilhelmsen books (this is the most recent one) but they are not yet translated into English. ( )

My blog post about this book is at this link. ( )

This review also appears on my blog,
1222">http://mswordopolis.blogspot.com.

1222 is the story of a train that crashes en route from Oslo to Bergen at an elevation on 1222 meters in the village of Finse. The survivors are evacuated to a hotel named, descriptively enough, Finse 1222, and they are holed up there for a few days, during which time two men are murdered. One hundred and ninety-six people live in relative comfort in the main hotel building as the story begins. This story is very much in the vein of a locked room Agatha Christie mystery, as the author has acknowledged, but this is a Norwegian version. For readers who are a bit leery of the gruesomeness of some Scandinavian crime novels, this book is a relief: the murders happen off-stage.


The investigator is Hanne Willhelmsen, a retired detective who suffered a paralyzing spinal cord injury when she was shot by the corrupt police chief she was investigating. She has been off the force for four years, and in those four years she has become more and more of a loner who spends time only with her partner, their young daughter, and the live-in housekeeper. Her three days in the hotel are not only her return to investigating homicides, but also her return to interacting with other humans. She’s prickly but interesting, and she’s definitely not a cliché.


What Holt does well is capture the group mood during their unforeseen stay in a remote mountain hotel during an extreme blizzard. Willhelmsen and an impromptu team of investigators—a doctor, a lawyer, and the hotel manager—bond as they investigate the two murders, at first trying to keep the murders a secret by claiming that the first victim “suffered a brain aneurysm,” instead of a bullet wound to the head. It’s a claustrophobic story of course, with the worsening storm outside. Besides the inquiry into the homicides, there is a parallel story about the mysterious final train compartment. Its occupants were evacuated first, and they occupy a wing that is guarded by armed men.


I admit that I don’t read many locked room mysteries—or at least I haven’t lately—but 1222 stands out with its characters. Holt provides enough back story for not only the victims and perpetrators, but also with Hanne Willhelmsen, of course, and Magnus Streng, the doctor who suffers from dwarfism who becomes as close of a friend as Hanne will allow herself. This book is the eighth in the Hanne Willhelmsen series, and I am looking forward to previous novels in the series being translated into English.


1222 by Anne Holt
Scribner
Publication date: December 27, 2011
Source: Publisher via NetGalley ( )