The Last Fix

January 25, 2010
Intense police inspector Gunnarstranda and his easygoing aide, Frank Frølich, tackle the murder of recovering drug addict Katrine Bratterud in Dahl’s entertaining third crime thriller featuring the Oslo cops to be made available in English (after The Man in the Window
). Bratterud’s nude, raped body turns up the morning after a party given by Annabeth Ås of the Vinterhagen Rehabilitation Centre and her husband, Bjørn Gerhardsen. It seems Bratterud came to the party with one boyfriend, left the party to meet another boyfriend, then went off on her own. Everyone has secrets to hide, and the two detectives have to contend with planted evidence, false confessions, red herrings, and, perhaps, a spurious connection to an unsolved murder decades earlier. Despite modern forensics, Gunnarstranda and Frølich rely on old-fashioned interview techniques, dogged comparisons of stories and time lines, to unravel the lies in a whodunit full of psychological insights.