Book Review for

The Indian Bride
(an Inspector Konrad Sejer mystery)

by Karin Fossum


The 4th Inspector Konrad Sejer mystery.

A Norwegian man, Gunder Jomann, a good man and confirmed bachelor,
travels to India to find a bride. He meets and marries a woman who had
served him six straight days in a restaurant. They marry, and they make
arrangements for her to fly to his country in two weeks. The day he is
supposed to pick her up at the airport, he receives a call that his sister
has been in a terrible car accident and is lying in a coma at the hospital.

Gunder, while staying at his sister's bedside, asks his friend, a cab driver,
to go to the airport to pick up his bride. His friend goes but cannot find her.
Then a woman's body is discovered in a meadow on the outskirts of town.
Her face has been beaten beyond recognition. The "good people of Elvestad"
believe that the murderer must have been someone passing through town.
But if this is true, why does the cafe owner secretly have the woman's suitcase
in his storeroom? Why does the 19-year old body builder, whose girlfriend broke
up with him the night of the murder, tell the police he was with another woman
who refuses to confirm this? Why can't the murder weapon, a blunt and heavy
object, be found? Why does a 16-year-old girl, who was riding her bicycle
past the meadow at the time of the murder, become morbidly obsessed
with one of the police inspectors? Why is the gas station owner, who
drives past the field on his way home from bowling, barely questioned
by the police?

Karin Fossum is a fine writer who engages the reader with intelligent
plots and suspicious characters. Her story endings leave the reader admiring
the investigative work of the tall, gentle, yet persistent Inspector Konrad Sejer,
yet wondering if perhaps someone else could have committed the crime.




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