Authors: Karin Fossum, Charlotte Barslund
ISBN-13: 9780156034043, ISBN-10: 0156034042
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: August 2009
Edition: (Non-applicable)
KARIN FOSSUM is the author of the internationally successful Inspector Konrad Sejer crime series. Her recent honors include a Gumshoe Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery/thriller.
Ida Joner gets on her brand-new bike and sets off toward town. A good-natured, happy girl, she is looking forward to her tenth birthday. Thirty-five minutes after Ida should have come home, her mother starts to worry. She phones store owners, Ida’s friendsanyone who could have seen her. But no one has.
Suspicion immediately falls on Emil Mork, a local character who lives alone and hasn’t spoken since childhood. His mother insists on cleaning his house weeklyalthough she’s sometimes afraid of what she might find there. A mother’s worst nightmare in either caseto lose a child or to think a child capable of murder. As Ida’s relatives reach the breaking point and the media frenzy surrounding the case begins, Inspector Konrad Sejer is his usual calm and reassuring self. But he’s puzzled. And disturbed. This is the strangest case he’s seen in years.
What a spare, artful novel this is: how lean, how swift, how bitterly sad. The solution to its mystery will not astonish perceptive readers, but even seasoned crime aficionados should savor the ineluctable undertow of dread surging beneath the surface of Black Seconds, dragging the characters out to seaquite literally, in one instanceand snarling their destinies like twine. We approach the final pages feeling wounded, as though a dagger had been plunged into our heart; and in her concluding sentences, Fossum twists the blade one last time. It's a merciless conclusion to a novel of rare, hypnotic power.