The Catalyst Killing

Starred review from December 12, 2016
Lahlum’s superlative third mystery featuring Kolbjørn “K2” Kristianson (after 2016’s Satellite People) finds the inspector on a routine call-out to an Oslo suburb in the summer of 1970. Shortly after K2 boards a train back to central Oslo, he sees a woman in her 20s run toward his carriage, but the doors shut just as she reaches it. She gestures toward him, her face “a frozen mask of fear,” as the train pulls out. Later the same day, K2 learns that the frightened woman, whose name is Marie Morgenstierne, was run over by another train. When K2 is assigned to investigate Marie’s death and the disappearance two years earlier of her lover, a leftist activist probing old stories from Norway’s Nazi past, he once again turns to Patricia Borchmann, a Nero Wolfe–like genius, for assistance. In an afterword, Lahlum says this installment started as a tribute to American author Ross Macdonald, whose books focused on family tragedy, but it’s also a trenchant political novel.