The Fifth Element

Another Scandi noir --seems I've been on a roll with these lately. Unfamiliar with author Jorgen Brekke, but it got a good review from Kirkus, so I thought I would give it a try. Maybe I am just getting mentally slow, but I found this book hard to follow. Normally, shifts in time and place don't bother me, but this one felt very disjointed.  This is the 3rd installment in his Detective Inspector Odd Singsaker series. Set in and around Trondheim (northern Norway), the book is divided into 4 parts, each focusing on a different character and each named  for one of the Aristotelian elements—phlegm, black bile, blood, and yellow bile. The fifth element refers to all the things in the spaces between the facts of an investigation that connects events, people, motivations, etc. 

In this book, Odd and his wife, Felicia, have had an argument and she has taken off to Oslo for some time to think about their relationship. She sent Odd a message that she was on her way home, but she never arrived. Another relationship has gone way off the rails; this one involves another runaway wife, with small child, and a police officer husband. He is planning to find his wife, kidnap his daughter, and disappear. We don't find out why until the end. There's a storyline about a couple of college students who steal some coke from a dealer and are now being hunted by a fairly ruthless enforcer. The stories are told in parallel  until they collide with explosive results. It's not clear really if the good guys win this time and the ending leaves the reader expecting future contact between at least two of the main characters. 

Publishers Weekly calls the book "stellar," while Booklist says it's "gripping." They go on to note, "The plot's leapfrogging flashbacks are challenging to follow, but Felicia's fight for survival, the suspense building to the final catastrophe, and the starkly rendered Scandinavian atmosphere offer strong appeal for Nordic-crime fans."  Kirkus concludes: "The intricately linked plotlines will appeal to puzzle fans. But it’s Brekke’s prodigious powers of invention, his ability to keep coming up with unforgettable characters and indelible episodes, that lift this above his own earlier work and most of the heavy Nordic competition."