Thrillers, Crimes - Fiction, Scandinavian Fiction, European Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature

What Is Mine

Name: What Is Mine
Author: Anne Holt
ISBN: 9780446178181

by Anne Holt

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Overview

All over Oslo, children are disappearing.

One afternoon after school, nine-year-old Emilie doesn't come home. After a frantic search, her father finds her backpack in a deserted alley. A week later, a five-year-old boy goes missing. And then another.

Meanwhile, Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler, is buried in crimes of the past, trying to get to the heart of a decades-old false murder conviction that's been keeping her up at night. But Police Commissioner Adam Stubo, who's haunted by his own demons, sees her as his only chance at unlocking this deadly pattern. Johanne resists at first, but when the bodies of the missing children start appearing in their family's homes with notes that say, "You got what you deserved," she decides to help.

While the Norwegian media is out hunting pedophiles, Stubo and Vik feel that the truth may be a larger, more complex story of revenge, one they're desperate to uncover before time runs out. A singularly clever crime story combined with a serious discussion of children and our responsibilities towards them, What is Mine introduces one of the most original crime-solving teams ever.

Synopsis

One afternoon after school, nine-year-old Emilie doesn't come home. After a frantic search, her father finds her backpack in a deserted alley. it is the backpack her deceased mother had given her a month before she died. Emilie would never leave that backpack behind voluntarily. A week later, a five-year-old boy goes missing. And then another.
Meanwhile, Johanna Vik, a former FBI profiler with a troubled past and a difficult young daughter, is buried in crimes of the past, trying to overturn a decades-old false murder conviction. Police Commissioner Stubo has personal reasons for wanting to solve the case of the missing children: not long ago he lost his wife and only daughter in a terrible accident, and now all he has left is his young grandson. But when he tries to enlist Johanna to help him crack the case, she's resistant. However, when the bodies of the missing children start appearing in their family's homes with notes that say, "You got what you deserved," Johanna decides to help Stubo.

While the rest of the Norwegian media is out hunting pedophiles, Stubo and Johanna manage to uncover a complex story of revenge. A singularly clever crime story combined with a serious discussion of children and our responsibilities towards them, What is Mine is the first installment in the the Stubo/Johanna crime series. Stubo and Johanna from one of the most original crime-solving teams ever.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

What makes the book interesting is its portrayal of a society so unfamiliar with heinous crimes that it absorbs them into the national consciousness.

About the Author, Anne Holt

Anne Holt is one of Scandinavia's most successful crime authors, with over 3 million books sold worldwide. She is a former Minister of Justice, lawyer, TV news editor and anchor, and journalist. She lives in Norway and France. She has lived in the United States and speaks perfect English.

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Editorials

USA Today

"The armchair detective always is in the market for new authors and fresh perspectives. Anne Holt, one of Norway's best-selling writers, fills the bill with WHAT IS MINE. Holt's language is spare, her plotting precise and her portrayal of human emotions remarkably astute."

Jo Nesbo

"Anne Holt is the godmother of modern Norwegian crime fiction."

<b>Starred Review</b> - Booklist

"Her American debut (the first of a three-book series starring Stubo and Vik) is both an impassioned commentary on the responsibilities of parenthood and an engrossing mystery with an ingenious final twist."

Marilyn Stasio

What makes the book interesting is its portrayal of a society so unfamiliar with heinous crimes that it absorbs them into the national consciousness.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

The Scandinavian crime fiction juggernaut continues with Norwegian Holt's U.S. debut, a well-written if overly long suspense thriller set in Norway. The novel opens with the abduction of nine-year-old Emilie Selbu, the first of several such kidnappings, and the complex backstory of Aksel Seier, a man imprisoned in the 1950s for a young girl's murder and inexplicably released from prison eight years later. Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler now working as an academic psychologist, is looking into the Seier case when Det. Insp. Adam Stubo asks her to help out with the case of the missing children, which gets more intense when the body of one of them is delivered to his mother with a chilling note: "Now you've got what you deserved." Both plot lines are compelling, but the author expends far too much narrative energy on the backgrounds of her many characters, and the connection linking the cases feels contrived. Nonetheless, this first in a three-part series to feature Vik and Stubo is a thoughtful, deeply disturbing exploration of a heinous crime. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The debut of Scandinavian best-selling author Holt is sure to catapult her into the mystery spotlight. A serial killer is running rampant in Norway. Children are being abducted, returned to their parents murdered but with no apparent cause of death, and accompanied by cryptic notes proclaiming, "Now you've got what you deserved." Norwegian Detective Inspector Adam Stubo solicits former FBI profiler Johanne Vik to confer on the case, but as the mother of a special-needs child, she is reluctant to enter the emotionally charged investigation. To complicate matters, Vik is already on a mission spurred at the request of a dying woman to exonerate an innocent man of an old murder conviction. Stubo, no stranger to personal hardship himself, finally persuades Vik to consult on his case. As the story progresses, Vik's two cases become entangled and fast-paced twists and turns plunge the reader into a nail-biting ending. Holt provides a gripping crime mystery in this first of a three-book series featuring Stubo and Vik. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Mystery Alert, LJ 3/1/06]. Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A savvy, sharply delineated suspense novel from Norwegian crime author Holt delves into the haunting motivation of a child-abductor. An identical blood-chilling note left on the bodies of several dead children abducted from their middle-class Oslo homes leaves police confounded: "Now you've got what you deserved," the note reads. Lawyer and psychologist at Oslo University, Johanne Vik, who wrote her thesis on why people commit sexually motivated crimes, is drawn into the case in a roundabout fashion while doing research on a 1965 child murder involving the probable wrongful imprisonment of a certain Aksel Seier, convicted for raping and killing an eight-year-old girl, although he was never proven guilty and the paperwork has since mysteriously vanished. Aksel was finally released and subsequently moved to the U.S., on Cape Cod, where Johanne plans to track him down and discuss his case to find out how "external interest," in the form of publicity, personalities, etc., affected the outcome. However, Johanne's academic expertise attracts the interest of dogged detective inspector Adam Stubo, a stocky widower keen on the use of intuition, who strong-arms Johanne, a divorced mother of a mentally challenged five-year-old, into lending the police help in creating a profile of the present child-killer. One of the children abducted, Emilie Selbu, has in fact not turned up dead, and in alternate chapters bearing various POVs, Holt describes the girl's horrific plight at the hands of her control-obsessed, nameless jailer. Johanne makes her journey to America, and visits the reclusive, diffident Aksel, who is not used to speaking his native tongue or hearing that someone sympathizes with hiswrongful conviction. By novel's end, what at first appears to be incongruous information comes together elegantly. Based on a true Norwegian murder case, Holt's work is cerebral, complicated and immensely rewarding.