A retiring detective drops the file of a older, settled case—husband kills wife—onto the desk of young Detective Henrik Holme. The husband and wife had lost a toddler as the result of an accident some years prior and it has been the cause of the couple’s falling out. Despite the straightforward evidence, something about the case has always bothered the older detective and he wanted to leave it in someone’s hands. Henrik, in his spare time, takes a look and soon suspects that the husband, who has already served his time in prison, might not have been the her killer and sets out to convince his mentor, Detective Hanne Wilhelmsen, of the same. At the same time a current case about the suicide of a right-wing blogger has also come to Hanne’s attention, and when the two detectives put their heads together they find that the two cases might really be connected….

Sadly, this is the last installment of Ann Holt’s Hanne Wilhelmsen series. Hanne is a brilliant, but anti-social detective who, over the course of the books, is shot and the resulting injury confines to a wheelchair (which makes her a bit more anti-social). These books are wonderful police procedurals, complex and brainy. And the relatively recent addition of the young Hendrik Holme—also brilliant, a bit quirky, and somewhat less anti-social—has been a plus. I highly recommend them, although very few were published in the US (apparently we weren’t ready for a lesbian detective). ( )

Although they have been allocated to cold cases, Wihelmsen and Holme each become obsessed with different cases where homicide and suicide fuse. After examining the rhetoric of a right-winger, anti-immigration activist, Wihelmsen becomes convinced the blogger was too self-righteous to have committed suicide. Meanwhile, a retiring superintendent asks Holme to reinvestigate a case where he obtained a murder conviction – but harbors concerns that justice was miscarried eight years ago. Wihelmsen and Holme’s frustration with each other is conspicuous in Reading’s narration. Grief, from multiple characters, is palpable as the ripple effects from past decisions and accidents change the present. Until the last moments, Holt and Reading continue to add layers of complexity to the investigators’ personalities. The Hanne Wilhelmsen series ends with an intricate police procedural that asks more thought-provoking questions than can be answered. Fans of literary as well as Scandinavian crime will be riveted. ( )

This is the tenth and final volume in the Hanne Willhelmsen series. As usual, she puts her prickly wheelchair-bound detective into a tricky plot, or rather two of them: a suicide that might actually be a murder, and a murder that perhaps wasn’t. The death that police believe to have been a suicide is that of a right-wing extremist celebrity who has been hounded by the media. Hanne thinks the psychology is all wrong for that particular woman to have taken her own life, and she wants her eccentric police detective sidekick Henrik Holme to look into it. (Perhaps it was me, but I found this part of the story confusing and not terribly engaging.) Meanwhile, another retired detective has given Henrik a case: he thinks he put an innocent man in prison for murdering his wife years ago. They had grown estranged after their small daughter ran into the street and was struck by a car and killed during a moment when her father was distracted. In the meanwhile, in a disturbing and powerful plot line that man, now out of prison, has grown obsessed with the driver’s granddaughter and begins to plan an action that seems to have wandered out of one of Karin Fossum’s moral psycho-dramas. You find yourself saying “oh no, no, don’t do that” quite often. To be perfectly honest, I’ve grown a little tired of Hanne and her irritable brilliance, but I’ve enjoyed other books by Anne Holt and look forward to whatever else she writes.