Oslo, 1938. War is in the air and Europe is in turmoil. Hitler's Germany has occupied Austria and is threatening Czechoslovakia; there's a civil war in Spain and Mussolini reigns in Italy.
When a woman turns up at the office of police-turned-private investigator Ludvig Paaske, he and his assistant - his one-time nemesis and former drug-smuggler Jack Rivers - begin a seemingly straightforward investigation into marital infidelity.
But all is not what it seems, and when Jack is accused of murder, the trail leads back to the 1920s, to prohibition-era Norway, to the smugglers, sex workers and hoodlums of his criminal past ... and an extraordinary secret.
Both a fascinating portrait of Oslo's interwar years, with Nazis operating secretly on Norwegian soil and militant socialists readying workers for war, The Assistant is also a stunningly sophisticated, tension-packed thriller - the darkest of hard-boiled Nordic Noir - from one of Norway's most acclaimed crime writers.
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Time is headstrong; it rolls on relentlessly and never looks back. KRISTIANA, 1924
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(@OrendaBooks, 13 March 2021, 283 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 25 May)
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This is a new author for me. I read a lot of Norwegian crime fiction though mostly contemporary fiction. The Assistant is a historical crime novel split between 1924 and 1938. The author makes it clear what year each chapter is set in so you won't get lost as the chapters rapidly weave back and forth. Both eras are really well written and I got a great sense of place so the author has clearly done his research. The novel has some elements of spy fiction, not my favourite genre so I didn't enjoy the book as much as I could have if it had been more of a straight-forward thriller. Nevertheless, I enjoyed much about the novel; the intriguing characters, the historical detail and the twists and turns.
