The Frog Theory

Starred review from July 10, 2017
In Dahl’s superb fifth series procedural to appear in English (after 2012’s Lethal Investments), Oslo police inspectors Gunnarstranda, a beekeeping sourpuss with a keen intellect, and Frank Frølich, a ladies’ man with a cynical side, team with detective Lena Stigersand, who sports a black eye she won’t explain, to pursue three murky and eventually related cases. Frølich traces a missing university student, Rosalind M’Taya, who just arrived from Uganda; Gunnarstranda goes after psychologist Erik Valeur, who’s a suspect in two rape-homicides; and Lena agrees to act as bait to trap a demented killer who preys on troubled women. Dahl highlights social issues in contemporary Norway, revealing the unsavory results of sexual obsession and obsessive greed, along with the personal cost that police officers pay to protect the public. The action comes to a climax in an utterly convincing chase through Oslo’s sewage system. The translator’s stripped-down, muscular prose is a plus.

July 1, 2017
Dahl, content to go by his initials in the English translations of his earlier Norwegian procedurals (Lethal Investments, as K.O. Dahl, 2012, etc.), unfurls his full name in signing his seventh.If only Inspector Frank Frolich enjoyed the same success with women that he does in his job on the Violent Crimes and Sexual Offenses squad of the Oslo Police. As it is, the man is as poisonous to women as they are to him. When he goes to the 40th birthday party of sewage engineer Karl Anders Fransgard, his happiness at meeting his old classmate's fiancee is seriously muted by the fact that he'd just arrested Veronika Undset for cocaine possession the night before. Frolich is frustrated as well as taken aback, because he'd pulled in Veronika only as a way to put pressure on her to talk about her meeting with her own classmate Kadir Zahid, a person of interest. The attempt failed, and Veronika walked out of jail in plenty of time to attend her fiance's party and then get murdered in an exceptionally brutal manner that casts suspicion on none other than Karl Anders. Her death puts the skids on whatever romantic relationship Frolich may have sought with her friend Janne Smith, the come-hither accountant who sat with him at the birthday party. Instead of making time with her, Frolich ends up joining his colleagues in nosing out possible links between Veronika's murder and the disappearance of recently arrived Ugandan student Rosalind M'Taya; the death of Signe Strand, killed in similar fashion in 2006; and the much more recent murder of Sivert Almeli, a librarian who was evidently stalking and photographing Veronika with her knowledge and consent. A glum, low-concept, diffusely plotted procedural that's much more disturbing scene by scene than as the rather lumpy whole it appears to be in the rearview mirror.

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