Today it’s my turn on the blog tour for Pursued By Death. 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:

When Varg Veum reads the newspaper headline ‘YOUNG MAN MISSING’, he realises he’s seen the youth just a few days earlier – at a crossroads in the countryside, with his two friends. It turns out that the three were on their way to a demonstration against a commercial fish-farming facility in the tiny village of Solvik, north of Bergen.

Varg heads to Solvik, initially out of curiosity, but when he chances upon a dead body in the sea, he’s pulled into a dark and complex web of secrets, feuds and jealousies.

Is the body he’s found connected to the death of a journalist who was digging into the fish farm’s operations two years earlier? And does either incident have something to do with the competition between the two powerful families that dominate Solvik’s salmon-farming industry?

Or are the deaths the actions of the ‘Village Beast’ – the brutal small-town justice meted out by rural communities in this part of the world.

Shocking, timely and full of breathtaking twists and turns, Pursued by Death reaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world’s greatest crime writers.

Review:

I’m a huge fan of Nordic Noir, and Gunnar Staalesen is one of my favourite authors in the genre. His writing is incredibly detailed and this makes it really easy to become caught up in the landscape, the characters and the story the author is telling. I haven’t read all the books in the series, but the author does a brilliant job of filling in the gaps so the reader can catch up.

Varg Veum is a really interesting character and I enjoy following his investigations. He’s a bit of a maverick, but he’s determined to find answers for the people for whom he is working, and I always feel like the investigation is in safe hands.

Pursued By Death is set in Solvik, a small Norwegian village. As the village is so small, everyone seems to know each other and I loved uncovering all the connections between all the residents. There are so many secrets between them and this means that the investigation in which Varg Veum is involved has quite a few suspects. I was completely intrigued the whole way through the novel.

The investigation is centred around the fish farming industry and I enjoyed learning about how this operated and the environmental concerns around fish farming. Although the novel is set around 20 years ago, many of the issues that are raised are very relevant to the environmental concerns of the present day, and so it still resonated with me.

There are several moments in Pursued By Death that are packed with danger and tension and this made the novel very exciting to read, especially towards the end. It is these scenes where the author’s description really comes into its own, taking the reader to the heart of some really gripping scenes.

I can’t wait to see what Varg Veum does next!

Pursued By Death is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: