Book Review: Unhinged, Blix and Ramm Book 3, Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger, translated by Megan Turney
Mystery: Unhinged, Blix and Ramm Book 3, Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger, translated by Megan Turney
Blog Tour February 9, 2022
Nordic noir. The very name evokes long, dark, frigid winters, criminals who thrive in the dark, and dark detectives who may themselves be creatures of the night. Of course, it is not always dark, and not all crimes happen at night, and not all detectives are troubled souls one step away from criminality themselves.
Alexander Blix is an excellent detective, but in Unhinged the crime is far too close to home. His protege on the force, Sofia Kovic, has been murdered. His daughter, Iselin, rented a room in Kovic’s house and was home when the murder took place. His daughter escaped, but the killer had pursued her until leaving when the police arrived.
We realize quickly that Blix is telling the story in interrogation. He is being interrogated. We are not sure why for much of the book and I don’t want to be the one to give it away. Let’s just say there are reasons why detectives should not take cases involving family members, doctors should not treat family members, and other high-pressure jobs should separate the professionals from acting on their family’s behalf.
Blix himself has always been a good person and a good detective. A devoted father, an equal-opportunity supporter of people in the department, never a hint of scandal. But the pressures of this case, which only mount as it develops, see him losing his grip on his sense of self. Unhinged could apply to many facets of this book. One of them is certainly the increasingly frantic and impulsive actions of the main character.
A translator has two roles. One is to accurately move the story from one language to another. This can be done in perfectly adequate ways that are also clunky. The second role of the translator is to capture the essence of the book, the vividness of the descriptions, the music of the original, and somehow find the words to encapsulate that original into a new language for a different culture. Megan Turney does a remarkable job. Since I cannot read Norwegian, I am grateful to her for the care and meticulous effort she has done in the translation.
Horst and Enger have written other books together. This is the third book featuring Detective Blix and journalist Emma Ramm. Both of them are also internationally best selling authors in their own rights. Sometimes a collaboration does not work. This one works beautifully.
Our thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for our copy of Unhinged, given so we could provide an honest review. The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives, check out the other bloggers on the tour.
Book Review: Unhinged, Blix and Ramm Book 3, Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger, translated by Megan Turney
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