Blessed Are Those Who Thirst

November 26, 2012
A sympathetic lead distinguishes Holt’s second novel featuring Oslo’s Det. Insp. Hanne Wilhelmsen (after The Blind Goddess). Hanne has been keeping her relationship with her female lover a secret, a choice that creates tension between the two women. Professionally, the inspector must deal with the person who’s leaving rooms drenched with blood every Saturday night, but without traces of an actual body, as well as a series of rapes. Evocative descriptive prose is a plus (“In the west, the heavens showed that intense hue only a Scandinavian sky in springtime is blessed with—royal blue on the horizon and lighter toward the meridian, before dissolving into a pink eiderdown where the sun was still lying lazily in the east”). Holt made her U.S. debut in 2011 with the eighth book in the series, 1222, which was an Edgar finalist.

Starred review from April 29, 2013
Edgar-finalist Holt’s stellar third Hanne Wilhelmsen novel (after 2012’s Blessed Are Those Who Thirst) finds the Oslo police detective uncomfortable with her six-month-old promotion to chief inspector, a dully managerial position that’s put her willy-nilly in the thick of the professional intrigue she deplores. Now faced with the murder of the formidable administrator of a foster children’s group home, the detective must also confront her own troubling demons. Hanne’s close friendship with her flamboyant assistant detective, Billy T., is making her question her values, while Cecilie, the partner with whom Hanne has shared her love and life since adolescence, wants the couple to have a child—a desire Hanne has denied for nearly 17 years. Holt also relentlessly explores the agonies of a mother unable to manage a monstrously brain-damaged 12-year-old boy—and the tragic ironies implicit in a society priding itself on cradle-to-grave welfare that condemns its most powerless and needy to inevitable disaster.