Today I’m joining the blog tour for Mirror Image. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Bergen Private Investigator Varg Veum is perplexed when two wildly different cases cross his desk at the same time. A lawyer, anxious to protect her privacy, asks Varg to find her sister, who has disappeared with her husband, seemingly without trace, while a ship carrying unknown cargo is heading towards the Norwegian coast, and the authorities need answers.

Varg immerses himself in the investigations, and it becomes clear that the two cases are linked, and have unsettling – and increasingly uncanny – similarities to events that took place thirty-six years earlier, when a woman and her saxophonist lover drove their car off a cliff, in an apparent double suicide.

As Varg is drawn into a complex case involving star-crossed lovers, toxic waste and illegal immigrants, history seems determined to repeat itself in perfect detail … and at terrifying cost…

A chilling, dark and twisting story of love and revenge, Mirror Image is Staalesen at his most thrilling, thought-provoking best.

Review:

I’m not completely up to date with Staalesen’s Varg Veum series but I do want to catch up in future. Meanwhile, although Mirror image is part of the series, it would be possible to read it as a standalone and you would be in for a treat. Staalesen’s writing is brilliant, often quite lyrical, and I loved immersing myself in Varg Veum’s world – Norway thirty years ago. I loved his descriptions of Norway and pictured the scenes in the novel really clearly.

As a private investigator, Varg Veum is intelligent and determined, which are qualities I love in a protagonist. His methods sometimes raise a few eyebrows but I enjoyed reading as he looked into the case. There are lots of complex relationships in the novel which were fascinating to follow and I enjoyed reading as Varg Veum got to the bottom of the details, for which he is a stickler.

Mirror Image is really well plotted and I loved the parallels between the investigation in 1993 and the investigation in 1957. I often had no idea what the answers were but I was keen to find out and I was intrigued the whole way through.

I look forward to Varg Veum’s next outing!

Mirror Image is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: