Synopsis
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 friends—anyone 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 weekly—although she’s sometimes afraid of what she might find there. A mother’s worst nightmare in either case—to 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.
The Washington Post - Daniel Mallory
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 sea—quite literally, in one instance—and 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.