Burned

August 29, 2011
In Enger’s plodding crime thriller debut, investigative reporter Henning Juul returns to work two years after an unexplained fire killed his six-year-old son and left him with facial scars and an obsession with smoke detectors. When Henning looks into the murder of 23-year-old Henriette Hagerup, who was discovered half-buried and stoned to death with her hand chopped off inside a tent in an Oslo park, he learns the victim was scouting locations for a student film. Suspicion quickly falls on Henriette’s Pakistan-born boyfriend, Mahmoud Marhoni, particularly after text messages from her are found on his phone that suggest she was seeing someone else. But the more Henning digs into Henriette’s life and her work as a film student, the less he believes the case is an honor killing related to sharia, the Muslim code of conduct. While Henning’s tortured psyche intrigues, it’s by no means unique in this genre, and he makes a tepid hero at best.

September 15, 2011

The latest in the endless series of claimants to Stieg Larsson's throne brings a suitably damaged investigative journalist a new case.

Two years after someone set fire to his home, killing his young son, memorably scarring his own face and torpedoing his marriage to fellow reporter Nora Klemetsen, Henning Juul is finally ready to return to his job at 123news. Or maybe not quite ready, since Heidi Kjus, one of the dozens of interns he trained, is now his boss, and Iver Gundersen, the newly poached reporter he's been paired with is Nora's boyfriend. Henriette Hagerup, the victim whose murder 123news, along with everyone else in Norway, is investigating, was stoned to death, her hand chopped off. Henning's despised former schoolmate, DI Bjarne Brogeland of the Oslo police, assumes it's an honor killing and goes after Henriette's lover, cabdriver Mahmoud Marhoni, who obligingly answers his knock on the door by setting fire to his computer and leaping out his apartment window. But Henning, aided by a mysterious cyber-informant he knows only as "6tiermes7," sees more deeply into the case. He learns Henriette had been jolted into submission by a stun gun before someone cast the first stone. He learns that under the supervision of Yngve Foldvik, of the Westerdals School of Communication, Henriette had been working with her friend Anette Skoppum on a film to be called A Sharia Caste. And once he reads Henriette's screenplay, he sees a new dimension of the case the police have no inkling of. But witnessing a second murder and realizing the murderer has seen him too leave Henning in no shape to do his best work.

Though it hits as many hot buttons as a Cosmopolitan quiz, Enger's debut mystery is tangled, lumpy and forgettable. The keeper here is Henning, whom the fadeout launches toward a sequel.

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