Circles within Circles

It’s weird to read this book. It’s the third book in the series, but I have already read in this order, books six, seven, eight, and then five, and then nine, and then one and two.

It’s a combination of when they came out in the US (I think they were not translated in order) and when my local libraries happened to have them.

But it’s also weird because in the US we’re seeing the antics of the Far Right (not entirely in the form of neo-nazis) start showing up more regularly in the news.

It’s also weird because I had to do a fair amount of googling to understand Norwegian history and Norwegian politics a little better. It’s also weird because it has a lot to do with letting the millenium act as a true closing off of the 20th century, even though it’s becoming clear we have a sort of long 20th century going on (for example, we just re-elected Nixon in the US).

That said, I really liked this book and think the mystery is solid. The novel plays on the above themes and deals with a country’s reckoning of it’s own connections to Nazi-ism. We have a pretty terrible history in the US for lots of reasons, but Nazis have long been our sort of “wellllllll, it’s not so bad” kind of out (it’s bullshit because we have plenty of genocide in our past). And more to the point, we’ve never really reckoned with any of the stuff we’ve done.

Nothing particularly stands out other than to say I happen to like the non serial killer books in the series more than the serial killer ones.