Nicely done Nordic noir that pits a journalist and a Chief Investigator against a vicious serial killer. Lots of twists and good atmospherics. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC.

The writing style didn't work for me. I found it choppy and confusing. It was paced well and I was interested in the characters and mystery but overall, I didn't connect to this.

4 stars

Viljar Ravn Gudmundsson is a journalist for the Haugesund News. His career is plodding along for he has lost his edge and doesn’t seem to care anymore about his stories. He receives an email that is disturbing, but he doesn’t want to believe it at first. It is like something out of a bad crime novel. It is from someone who has apparently appointed themselves judge and jury is has promised to bring retribution for crimes committed. He takes the email to his editor who tells him it seems fantastic and to forward it to the police.

Chief Inspector Lotte Skeisvoll is with the Haugesund Police Department. She responds to a call of a possible suicide of a woman. She and the officers with her at the scene take little time to ascertain that it is a homicide, not a suicide. She was fifty-seven and her name was Rita Lothe.

CI Lotte gets an idea and makes connections and so calls into her office Viljar. She knows that he is the one who forwarded the strange email about homicides to come to the police. While in Lotte’s office, he gets another email from the killer. He does some research with his editor and they believe they’ve found the name of the man who is to be the next victim.

Viljar suffers from anxiety attacks which began about three years earlier. They are disabling and terribly frightening. When an investigator from the Kripos joins the team, ostensibly to help the investigation, not to take it over, the man named Hansen zeros in on Viljar for some reason. He is rude to Lotte and dismissive of her team. It is becoming clear that someone is trying to set him up. He is also having significant problems with his sixteen-year old son who just seems to do whatever he wants.

Viljar begins to sense something familiar about the case. The something is to do with the disaster that his life became four years earlier. More people die and Viljar goes missing.

This book follows the detailed and slow moving police investigation into a serial killer who seems not to care if they get caught or not. Leaving all kinds of forensic material behind at his murders, he is laughing at the police. He is obviously not in their records. Slowly, the ice thaws between Hansen and Lotte. They begin to work together – well, more than they have in the past. When the killer targets Lotte, the police set up a trap for him.

In an exciting double bluff, the reader is entranced to learn the identity of the killer. His twisted reason for committing the murders leaves the reader shaking their head.

This is a well written, plotted and translated novel. While it moves a little slowly in places, it is essentially a good read. The novel moves back and forth in time, so the reader gets an opportunity to learn about what has gone before in the life of Viljar. There is sufficient information given about the two main characters, Lotte and Viljar so as to flesh them out, but not so much that it intruded on the story at all. In fact it added to the story when one learns how the book ends. Geir Tangen is a new author for me, and I went to Amazon to look for other books by them, but alas, I couldn’t find any other Kindle editions in English.

I want to thank NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for forwarding to me a copy of this good book to read, enjoy and review.

Down-on-his-luck Norwegian reporter Vilgar Ravn Gudmundsson is singled out by a killer, fed emails revealing his self-righteous, mortiferous plans. The local upstart police investigator's position on the team is threatened by the big-city profiler. Underlying it all is a four-year-old scandal involving sex, bribes, and a government administrator. As the killer gets closer to the lives and intimates of the main characters, they frantically search for a motivation beyond the sins proclaimed in the killer’s messages. Geir Tangen’s Requiem takes these familiar threads and twists them. Violently.

Tangen writes with a practiced hand, his plot points are unique, and many of his characters evolve dramatically through the course of the novel. While the short chapters are typical of this genre, periodic journal-like confessions from the killer help to vary the storytelling. Yet, at times the plot does not sustain the tension and it seems the author doesn’t know what to do with the characters between moments of crisis. And while it may be an issue with the translation, several of the metaphors fall flat.

Overall, while Geir Tangen’s Requiem may play on some common murder-mystery tropes, it possesses an articulated self-awareness that sets it apart from the pack. The last third of the book is lightning fast. And Tangen gives several nods to the great thriller writers of our time.

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books, and Mr. Tangen for the advanced copy to review.

In this first, very promising book of what will become a series, a Norwegian journalist gets pulled into a murderous crime spree by the killer, himself. Viljar Gudmundsson dismisses an email where the author announces he will kill a woman, or execute her, for her sins. Viljar dismisses the email as the rantings of a lunatic. But when a woman’s body is found and another email announces another”guilty” person will be executed, he knows he’s in the middle of something big. With the help of investigator Lotte Skeisvoil, he works to try to unmask a killer before he can strike again. Palpable tension radiates from this new and stellar voice in Nordic Noir