The Hermit

Starred review from September 12, 2016
Erhard, the 60ish hero of Rydahl’s brilliant, scathing debut, which won the Glass Key Award in 2015 for best Nordic crime novel, is a down-at-heels expatriate Danish cabbie and sometime piano tuner. This “old man with tired eyes” has lived in a shack on Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, with only two skittish goats for company for about 20 years. He sends much of his meager earnings to his ex-wife and daughters in Denmark, drinks too much, and occasionally scavenges dumpsters for food. When a three-month-old baby boy is found starved to death in a cardboard box in a car that washes up on the beach, Erhard is outraged. With virtually no resources, lacking a computer and the savvy to use one, but drawing on his own wits and calling in a multitude of favors, Erhard doggedly traces the dead baby’s mother and uncovers a complex smuggling scheme. Stunningly conceived and expertly executed, this portrayal of one man’s thirst for justice in the face of human corruption proves that not even a self-isolated hermit can be an island unto himself. Agent: Jacob Busch, Busch Agency (Denmark).

A nine-fingered part-time piano tuner, Canary Island cab driver, and self-appointed investigator ambles through a case involving the death of an infant.If Danish debut author Rydahl is launching a series, he's come up with a winner in what would be its first installment. (The book garnered the Danish Crime Glass Key Award.) Rydahl centers on a canny, idiosyncratic protagonist, Erhard Jorgensen, who will charm readers. Jorgensen subsists on tinned food--eaten from the tin--and nightly tucks under his pillow a finger he found at an accident site; he hopes to pass it off as his missing tenth digit. Nearing 70, Erhard may be the eponymous hermit to some on the island, but it's clear that as a taxi driver involved with his neighbors and co-worker, the term is a misnomer. His ties to humankind emerge when he discovers an infant, probably 12 weeks old, in a car abandoned on a beach. How and why did this happen? Where are the parents? Haunted by the image of the baby, Erhard goes after the case--and in his own fashion. When police tell him they've found the culprit, a prostitute named Alina, Erhard insists they're just trying to avoid a PR disaster because tourism is down. To deny the police evidence, he kidnaps the working girl, musing that prostitutes "sell oneself in bite-sized chunks garnished with one's soul." Then he finds Alina brutally murdered. To keep police unaware the prostitute is dead, Erhard disguises her corpse by stripping the body of his friend Beatriz, beaten unconscious by unknown thugs, and putting her clothes on Alina. Meanwhile, Beatriz's boyfriend Raul, who works for an island crime syndicate, goes missing. The case doesn't exactly hurtle to its melancholy finish, but Erhard's wry musings and Rydahl's high-resolution images of the island help the reader to settle into the deliberate tempo. A languid stroll with a sage detective through vivid locales that leaves a lasting impression. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 1, 2016
An unlikely man is on a quest for justice in this literary crime novel. Title character Erhard Jorgenson, who's spent nearly 18 years of solitary life on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura (his backstory in Denmark is never fully revealed), is stricken when the body of a three-month-old boy is found in a car in the water off a beach. Erhard, a piano tuner and taxi driver who's envied for his uncanny ability to find passengers, is contacted by police when scraps of a Danish newspaper are found covering the boy's body. But when he learns that the authorities, under pressure to close the case, have bribed a local prostitute to take responsibility for the infant's death, Erhard intervenes, initially just detaining the woman but gradually becoming sucked into a morass of corruption and crime. Even in his older age, the intuitive Erhard is absolutely dogged in seeking the truth about the boy's death as he risks virtually all that he holds dear. This remarkably assured debut novel, a superb blend of literary and crime fiction, has won fiction awards and been a best-seller in Denmark, with film and TV rights already sold and a sequel promised.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)