Eva's Eye (Inspector Sejer Series #1)

by Karin Fossum

Overview

The debut mystery novel in the Inspector Sejer Series from Norway’s award-winning author of Hell Fire and The Whisperer.

Eva Magnus and her daughter are out walking by the river when they make a grisly discovery: a man’s body floating on the water’s surface. Eva goes to call the police, but when she reaches the phone, she dials another number altogether for her own reasons. But when the police find the body anyway, Inspector Sejer and his team quickly determine that the man, Egil, died from a violent attack.

But Egil himself had been missing for months, and the trail to his killer is all but vanished. It’s just as puzzling as another unsolved case on Sejer’s desk: the murder of a prostitute, found dead just before Egil went missing. And as Sejer tries to piece together these two impossible cases, it soon appears that the two murders are connected. And if the Inspector can’t figure out the culprit behind the crimes, someone else is going to pay with their life.

“No one can thoroughly chill the blood the way Karin Fossum can.” —Los Angeles Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547738772
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Series:	Inspector Sejer Series , #1
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	112,932
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

KARIN FOSSUM is the author of the internationally successful Inspector Konrad Sejer crime series. Her recent honors include a Gumshoe Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery/thriller. She lives in Norway.

Editorial Reviews

Expect high demand for the debut title in Fossum's popular series (first time available in English). No excuses for not meeting the compelling Norwegian Insp. Konrad Sejer now. [See Prepub Alert, 2/11/13.]

Library Journal

Originally published in Norway in 1995, Fossum’s entertaining first Insp. Konrad Sejer mystery is finally available in English (after 2012’s The Caller, the eighth series entry to be published in the U.S.). While walking along the riverbank of an unnamed small town, divorced artist Eva Magnus and her seven-year-old daughter, Emma, spot a dead body floating in the river. In front of the inquisitive Emma, Eva pretends to call the police, but instead calls her father. When the police discover that the body is that of a murdered prostitute who used to be a friend of Eva’s, suspicions arise. Eva’s transition from struggling painter and single mother to something new and unpredictable will delight fans searching for the next diverting Scandinavian mystery. While Eva steals the center stage from Sejer, her increasingly fraught decisions give this dark police procedural warmth despite the frigid environs. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Karin Fossum and the Inspector Sejer series:   "Fossum crafts remarkably incisive psychological suspense: novels that carry the headlong momentum of thrillers and the acuity and weight of literary fiction." —The Washington Post   "The next Scandinavian literary superstar." —Chicago Tribune   "They never last very long, those anonymous joggers and dog-walkers whose only purpose in a crime story is to trip over the body in the woods. Unless, of course, they figure in a novel by Karin Fossum, who makes it her business—and the business of her uncommonly sensitive Norwegian detective, Inspector Konrad Sejer—to scrutinize in great depth and detail every person touched by a murder." —The New York Times Book Review   "I always eagerly await a new novel from Karin Fossum." —Ruth Rendell   "One thing...that immediately sets Fossum's fine mystery apart from other, merely sensational variations on this story line is its self-consciousness…Like the well-ripened queens of psychological suspense to whom she is inevitably compared—Ruth Rendell and PD James—the younger Fossum charts this excursion into the unthinkable with poetic restraint." —The Washington Post   "A truly great writer and explorer of the human mind." —Jo Nesbo   "By stripping away the usual police procedurals, Fossum suffuses her fiction with something closer to the unsparing vision of her great predecessor, Knut Hamsun." —The Independent   "Sejer is a beautifully created character, a thoughtful, lonely man with great empathy." —Publishers Weekly   "Tremendous suspense…A treasure for fans." —Kirkus Reviews (starred) —

From the Publisher

This first (1995) in the Police Inspector Konrad Sejer series is engagingly presented by Steven Crossley. His warm, conversational style is ideal for Sejer, who is always calm and considerate, no matter the situation. When Oslo artist Eva Magnus finds a body floating in the river and fails to report it, Sejer is puzzled. Crossley excels at portraying Eva’s father, a tired but spirited old gent whom Eva is close to. However, Crossley’s best creation is Maja Durban, Eva's old school friend who has become a prostitute. When she's murdered, Eva decides to investigate. Listeners accompany her as she closes in on the killer—or killers. Crossley's understated narration of the story’s climax is far more terrifying than a highly emotional one. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2015 - AudioFile

Inspector Sejer's first case. Egil Einarsson's employment at a brewery and his drinking bouts with his buddies at the King's Arms seem to have been the high points in a singularly uneventful life. When his thoroughly stabbed body washes up under the eyes of hardscrabble painter Eva Marie Magnus and her daughter Emma six months after he disappeared, Inspector Konrad Sejer can't resist making a connection: Einarsson went out, ostensibly to show his Opel Manta to an interested buyer, only three days after the smothering of prostitute Maja Durban in her room a stone's throw from the King's Arms. Since Maja was an old school friend of Eva's, and the two, after not seeing each other for 25 years, had dinner together the night before Maja died, Sejer naturally assumes that Eva is the key to both cases--especially once he satisfies himself that after she found Einarsson's body, Eva only faked a call to let the police know. But Eva's not saying a thing; she's not even admitting she didn't place that phone call. Working as phlegmatically but effectively as ever, Sejer makes modest progress on the case. Halfway through the tale, however, Fossum switches over to a long, virtuoso flashback that reveals everything her hero has only guessed. This hoary trick shouldn't work, but it does, gathering tremendous suspense as it builds to a shattering climax. Originally published in Norway in 1995, this tour de force doesn't have the remorseless wall-to-wall creepiness of Sejer's most chilling cases (The Caller, 2012, etc.). But it's more than a worthy introduction to one of Norway's leading cops for newcomers and a treasure for fans.

Kirkus Reviews