I had little or no idea of her background, but for reasons unknown she had chosen to make her living roaming the streets as a prostitute in Bergen, a coastal town with several hundred years of such activity. But once, not a very long time ago, in an overcrowded metropolis or in a frozen rural district, she has been someone’s little daughter, a small girl who played with tatty dolls, if she had any, a schoolgirl who had taught herself to read, heard about Brezhnev and Kosygin and other famous people, had her first lover, if she hadn’t been raped by a brutal stepfather, a precocious boy or a seaman on leave; one small person on her way into life, later across the border in the neighboring country in which she stayed long enough to acquire the local dialect before moving south to the town where all too abruptly she would end her days, without anyone knowing where she came from or who she was. (p. 154)
I probably should have started reading the Varg Veum detective series with the very first one, but Arcadia Books sent me Cold Hearts a long time ago and so here is where I started.
Veum is a private investigator, much like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, or John MacDonald’s Travis McGee, they are men who are strong and determined, in pursuit of justice, and compassionate. Veum is different, though, as he is Norwegian. The descriptions of the scenes and the streets, the restaurants and the stores, allow me to sense that I am there. Even if I can’t pronounce the names.
A former classmate of Veum’s son comes to his door, telling him that her friend, Maggi, has disappeared. They are street walkers, girls who turn tricks in desperation to survive, as they can find no other options in which to make a living. Often, they have been abused and turned to drugs.
It is extremely difficult for Varg to find Maggi; he must stumble through all kinds of other people first. He discovers that her brother is also missing, and worse than that he is missing from prison where he was incarcerated for killing a PE teacher. (Not that I have pleasant memories of gym classes, myself; they were the worst part of going to school.)
Also, two horrific characters named Kjell Malthus and Rolf Terje Daley have beaten up someone named Lars, after stealing all the heroin he had been transporting from Denmark.
To top it off, Carsten Mobekk has been found brutally murdered in his own home. He once was the head of a committee that had sought to help Maggi, her brother, Kalle, and her sister, Siv, as they were impoverished children with ineffective, to say the least, parents.
How does this tie in with Maggi’s disappearance? Unlike most American thrillers, the writing is complicated and unpredictable. I am transported to a world which is not my own, not only by profession(s), but also by culture. No wonder Cold Hearts is an international best seller with over 2 million copies sold.
