No Echo

Starred review from August 1, 2016
Edgar-finalist Holt’s impressive second collaboration with Reiss-Andersen, the sixth in Holt’s Hanne Wilhelmsen series (after Dead Joker), explores a crucial episode in the life of her talented Oslo police detective, who’s emotionally crippled by feelings of guilt that she uses to keep people away and conceal her real self. By the time an elite chef is found stabbed to death in Oslo, Hanne has been living for six months in a run-down monastery hotel near Verona, Italy, recovering from the death of her lover of nearly 20 years, Cecilie Vibe. Hanne’s police team, now led by the colorful and conflicted Billy T., wishes Hanne, with all her idiosyncrasies, were back. Arriving in Oslo, fresh from meeting a Turkish mathematics professor who becomes Hanne’s new lover, Hanne begins uncovering unpalatable secrets. Transcripts of witness statements alternate with Holt’s penetrating psychological analysis of human desires, weaknesses, and essential decency, unveiling unexpected dimensions of her series characters.

July 15, 2016
Franchise owner Holt (Blind Goddess, 2016, etc.) teams up with Reiss-Andersen to bring Chief Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen back from her grief-soaked stay in Verona to rejoin Oslo's Violent Crime Section.The murder of Brede Ziegler is anything but straightforward. Norway's best-known chef stepped on a million toes to achieve celebrity status. His wife of six months, Vilde Veierland Ziegler, was barely half his age, and the boyfriend she threw over for him is still very much in the picture. Ziegler was stabbed to death with a knife whose pedigree is almost as exalted as his own. And his body was left on the unused back staircase of the Police Security Service. Fortunately, the mystery just happens to coincide with Hanne's sense that she's retreated to chaste seclusion to mourn her late partner, Cecilie Vibe, for long enough and her sudden eagerness to return, though the circumstances under which she left Chief Inspector Billy T. and her other colleagues make her wonder whether she still has a job. Welcomed warmly back to Violent Crimes, though not to Billy T.'s friendship, Hanne is on hand for still further complications: the news that Ziegler recently had himself sterilized, hints of financial shenanigans at Entre, his exclusive restaurant, and post-mortem revelations that indicate that if he hadn't been stabbed to death, he would almost certainly have died from the poison someone had given him. But the most notable job she does as a police detective is to extract a statement from a killer who's only too willing to talk. Though it's good to see Holt's detective back in the saddle, her return case is tangled and forgettable, with the most intriguing features sadly underdeveloped.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016
This sixth Hanne Wilhelmsen novel (following Dead Joker, 2016) is a nearly pitch-perfect procedural layered over a moving exploration of rejection and abandonment. Oslo's hottest celebrity chef, Brede Ziegler, is left on the police station's steps with a butcher knife thrust in his chest. Chief Inspector Billy T. leads the investigation, which is a disaster from the start. Ziegler, egotistical and likely sociopathic, was widely despised. Billy T.'s team easily hauls in a parade of likely killers, but none of them can be implicated by solid evidence. Then Wilhelmsen returns to Oslo after months of self-exile spent grieving over her domestic partner's death and jolts the faltering investigation further. Billy T., furious over her callous abandonment, refuses to acknowledge her presence. Alienated from the team, Hanne follows her own path, instinctively trailing the killer through the investigation's loose threads. Tragedy serves as a catalyst as Hanne drops walls and reluctantly acknowledges her failures, forges new romantic ground, and develops an oddly sound friendship with a junkie prostitute connected to the case.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)