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.