The Dinosaur Feather

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: How could one man inspire such hatred?

Professor Lars Helland is found at his desk with his tongue lying in his lap. A violent fit has caused him to bite through it in his death throes. A sad but simple end. Until the autopsy results come through.

The true cause of his death - the slow, systematic and terrible destruction of a man - leaves the police at a loss. And when a second member of Helland's department disappears, their attention turns to a postgraduate student named Anna. She's a single mother, angry with the world, desperate to finish her degree. Would she really jeopardise everything by killing her supervisor?

As the police investigate the most brutal and calculated case they've ever show more known, Anna must fight her own demons, prove her innocence and avoid becoming the killer's next victim.

The Dinosaur Feather is the most fascinating, complex and unusual Scandinavian crime novel since Smilla's Sense of Snow.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the twenty-fifth, a book that's a guilty pleasure.

Scandicrime has, apart from Jussi Adler-Olson, eluded me. I'm not hooked, I'm not repelled, I'm simply bemused by the warbles and hoots of addicted rapture. I gave up on Arnaldur's books because grim, I disliked that rape victim trilogy deeply, I can't read books starring a person named Harry Hole. I simply can't. So me and the Scandis, we're not besties.

I do, however, really really like this book. It's got a background--and ONLY a background, no sciencey stuff need slow you down--of one of the most fascinating paleontological issues around, that is the dinosaurian origins of birds. It features a detective with angst. (Hoo BOY does he have angst.) The suspect is a single mom in search of a degree to build a good life for herself and her baby. And as a bonus the victim badly needed killing, and was dispatched in a way that still fills all the nooks and crannies of my soul with schadenfreude.

So why call this almost-four-star read a guilty pleasure? Because it's relentlessly downbeat. Yes, the crime is solved, but honestly I wish it hadn't been. The dick who died? Yeah, well, pity about that, please pass the jelly. The secrets that erupt into unforgettable daylight? Better for everyone if they'd just stayed secret and life had percolated along with shiny surfaces and unpocked skin.

And I thoroughly, completely reveled in the nastiness. Shame on me! #sorrynotsorry


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

January is often a very good reading month for some reason. That alone doesn't make a lot of sense - it's normally hot enough to melt the tin on the roof, which isn't conducive to concentration. Making THE DINOSAUR FEATHER look like a rather risky choice. At 535 pages it was way too big for any struggle with concentration, and after starting the book and finding myself deep in discussions on paleo-ornithology and not a lot of "crime action", I was feeling somewhat sceptical to say the least. Add to that a central character who is just a little inclined to be whingy, very prickly, with more than a hefty dose of self-entitlement and I really did question my sanity for starting this book off at this time of the year.

But there can be show more something appealing about the idea of a character being somewhat unpleasant, as long as there is a very realistic feel to the portrayal. Leaving aside a slight personal tendency to sympathise with prickly, Anna Bella Nor is extremely realistic. Complicated, with a messy personal life, she's completely focused on the completion of her degree to the detriment of many of her personal relationships. Not that her relationship with her divorced parents ever seems to have been plain sailing. Her dislike and antagonism for her supervisor - Professor Lars Helland - isn't hidden, even when his sudden and very odd death becomes the subject of a police investigation. In contrast to Anna, her colleague Johannes is considerably more placid, accepting and caring. He's got a lot more reasons for life to disappoint than Anna, yet he's always able to see the good side in the people around them. Superintendent Soren Marhauge is also a man with a complicated personal life, full of regret and loss, yet he is also more like Johannes in outlook, if not lifestyle - he also finds himself dangerously fascinated by Anna Bella.

Looking at that summary it would be very easy to assume that this is yet another book in which the women are volatile and complicated and the men all tolerant and straightforward. Goodness knows I've been dragged down that path a bit recently. Whilst there is a lot of that classification going on, this author has managed to create a level of reality to these people that doesn't exaggerate the roles or overplay that comparison. Anna Bella is a tricky woman to deal with (as is her mother), but there are also kind, controlled women around them, and not everything in Anna Bella is bad, or wrong, or off kilter. The men may seem controlled, kind and wise, but they are all hiding secrets and behaviour which is less than perfect. It's those aspects of the characters that keeps them from feeling like roles have been assigned for the purposes of creating a reaction, and more like people who could very well be the reader, or people the reader knows.

Be warned though, it takes quite a while for the "crime" to happen in this book, possibly because there are all these complicated and rather fraught personal backgrounds and relationships. There's a lot of stuff that's not directly related to the crime itself going on, and whilst some of that did get a little repetitive at points, and there was just a slight inclination to tell, rather than show; mostly the plot, the story and all it's elements filled the 535 pages pretty successfully. Having said that, you're going to have to find the world of the evolution of birds and their relationship to dinosaurs interesting because at some points in the book you'll be pulled well into the discussion. Not, I'd hasten to say, in an overly scientific or learned manner, all of the information was quite readable, and personally I found it quite fascinating. Perhaps because it was compelling it didn't always feel like too much of a distraction or deviation from the crime itself.

The cause and resolution of the crime, getting back to the point of crime fiction after all, was nicely constructed, and despite one of the most bizarre methods of killing I've come across in a long while, perfectly feasible in the world in which it was placed. As a pure puzzle solver there were clues along the way for the reader to work with, and whilst it does take a while to get to the point where the resolution of the crime starts to be drawn out, I doubt it will come as a massive surprise to most. What probably appealed to this reader most of all about THE DINOSAUR FEATHER was the journey, and the unusual setting and environment in which the story is conducted. Regardless of what made the book work, it was a real surprise to find that this book was the one that's kept my perfect strike rate of at least one favourite book of the year coming in the first month of the year. show less

Here’s how BookBrowse described this book:
Winner of the Danish Crime Novel of the Decade, S.J. Gazan's debut novel The Dinosaur Feather is a classic of Scandinavian noir, from its richly imagined and deeply flawed characters to its scintillating exploration of one of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary dinosaur and avian research.

Biology postgraduate and hopeful PhD Anna Bella Nor is just two weeks away from defending her thesis on the origin of birds when her supervisor, the arrogant and widely despised Dr. Lars Helland, is found dead in his office chair at the University of Copenhagen. In the dead man's bloody lap is a copy of Anna's thesis.

When the autopsy suggests that Helland may have been murdered in a fiendishly show more ingenious way, the brilliant but tormented young Police Superindendent Søren Marhauge begins the daunting task of unraveling the knotted skeins of interpersonal and intellectual intrigue among the scientists at the university. Unfortunately for him, everyone involved - from embittered single mom Anna Bella Nor to Marhauge's own ex-wife, who is pregnant with her current husband's child - has something to hide, presenting the detective with the greatest professional and personal challenge of his entire career.

Correction to above: Marhauge was not married to Vibe, but they were together for a very long time.

I liked this book and didn’t like this book. The story was good – academic controversies and infighting, murders and a detective. There was also a fascinating discussion of what it takes to be true to science versus pet theories. However, there were three main characters, two murders, and so many secondary themes that I sometimes found myself bewildered. I felt like the author wanted to say so much about so many things but tried to compress them into one book.

The translation was uneven, too. Every once in a while there would be something to distract – usually related to dialogue or expressed emotions. Lots of screaming and what seem to be disproportionately strong emotions when taken in context to the scene.

Having said those negatives, my liking it is beginning to win out over my disliking it, and I’m sure I’ll remember it for quite a while. In addition, there is a sequel, [The Arc of the Swallow], which is now on my wishlist. show less

http://tinyurl.com/m29og92

There is no question this is a compelling book. From start to finish, you are pulled inexorably to the end, or should I say, ends. (There are at least three of them.)

Now, I'm a Swedish mystery aficianado, so I was super geeked to see this in my Christmas stocking a few days ago. (Yes, I read it that fast.) I figured, the Danes must be learning to push back - break that lock that the Swedes have had for decades. I really wanted to see if that was true.

A solid B+ for effort and style. Gazan aces the Scandinavian mournful tone (in spades), provides a solid set of plots, and she's a biologist so her themes have a more interesting bent than usual. She has an easy, light writing style (as translated), with the show more occasional excellent turn of phrase to make you smile or raise your eyebrows.

Also, unexpectedly, Gazan gives you a boatload of backstory, which while also compelling, comes at a very odd time in the book, ie, the beginning. I mean, at least 70 pages of backstory. It moves very quickly, but it begins to dawn on you that this is an extraordinary amount, and either the author is brilliantly setting you up for the ending or she's a pretty dumb writer. How to know when it's the first book of hers you've ever read? There is, in fact, a reason for it, but I'll give nothing away here.

(I should also say that this is the first book in a long while that I have read in paper. There was something comforting about being able to turn actual, non-digital pages. No, that alone won't put me off using my Kindle forever and always.) show less

This Danish crime novel is a debut novel with a lot of promise, but also one with some significant problems. On the promising side, it has an unusual setting, an unusual murder weapon, and a wide variety of unusual possible motives. It is set in the Department of Biology/Zoology of the University of Copenhagen: an academic setting is nothing new for a mystery, but most fictional murder in academe seems to involve the humanities. The murder weapon is very scientific and singularly icky: i will leave this unrevealed. As to the characters, mostly academics with the exception of a police detective, some are truly sympathetic, some are truly unsympathetic, and some are really, really weird.

What does work about this novel is the strong show more characterization, and the posing of unusual motives, for murder and for other things. What doesn't is the excessive length of some bits, most notably the characters' back stories, which tend to be delivered in large chunks that get in the way of the action. Also, the solution to the mystery seemed somewhat forced to me.

I shall look forward to reading more by this author, and I hope that she gets better editing next time round. show less

A professor at the University of Copenhagen is murdered in a biologically gruesome manner. For some years he has been engaged in a vitriolic argument with an American professor over the question of whether birds evolved from dinosaurs. A student who loathes him has taken his side for a dissertation that is on the verge of completion, and the American professor is in Copenhagen for a conference. The dinosaurs are the main attraction. The characters are gratuitously weird, and the backstories of student and professor and investigating police officer are plodding, but I chalk this up to a first novel, the author not yet skilled enough to integrate the elements of a story. I’d definitely read another, and it happens that another, again of show more science and academia, is soon to be published. show less

I’m really disappointed with this book. Maybe I wouldn’t be if it weren’t for all the raving reviews, such as it being the Danish crime novel of the decade. Having finished the book (out of a sheer persistence and hopefulness that it would eventually live up to its reviews), I am perplexed by why people enjoyed this. This book is trashed with unnecessary drama and detailed histories into the past lives of the characters. Supposedly, such was meant to give deeper context to the characters and the outcome, but unfortunately it only diminished whatever potentially interesting science and mystery of the story down to a null. The author wasted much time bringing many characters into this book and explaining their extensive boring show more histories, all of which had nothing to do with the evolution of the story. This is much less of a crime novel than a drama, some thing I did not sign up for. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, it is a complete waste of time. show less