| Publisher | Penguin |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 12 December 2019 |
| ISBN-10 | 1405941618 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1405941617 |
| Format | paperback |
| Pages | 416 |
| Price | £ 8.99 |
The Cabin
by
Chief Inspector William Wisting is assigned to lead a top-secret investigation into the life of a recently deceased controversial politician. When he finds boxes full of foreign currency in his cabin, he also manages to unearth possible links to two 15-year-old cold cases, one of them of a missing young man.
Review
The death of the controversial retired politician Bernhard Clausen is not suspicious as he had already suffered heart attacks. However, the circumstances surrounding the discovery at his cabin on the Norwegian south coast are very much so. In fact, the country’s Director General of Public Prosecution has personally asked Chief Inspector William Wisting to handle the highly confidential investigation into the secret life of Clausen.
The former Member of Parliament for the Labour Party was a man struck by two personal tragedies and deeply affected in his position as a prominent political figure caught in an impossible moral dilemma. Within a short period of time years ago his wife Lisa died of incurable cancer and his son Lennard died in a motorcycle accident. Between these two events something else must have happened as all those close to Clausen commented on his shifting views on society and its values.
Wisting and Mortensen, the crime scene technician, are given free rein to search for anything and everything in the cabin, and to expand the investigative team if needed. Soon they find stacks of petrol cans and boxes full of foreign currency – dollars, euros and pounds amounting to about 80 million kroner in today’s value but the serial numbers point to their circulation in 2003. Among the money there is also a random phone number, a key and a mini jack for transferring sound files.
Securing faint fingerprints and the minimal evidence leads to establishing loose ties to events from the same year. One of them was the disappearance of a young man, Simon Meier, who never returned home from his fishing trip. The case was shelved and eventually his death recorded as drowning in a lake, but a lone anonymous tip-off linked it to Clausen, apparently in the same area. The other was the outrageous robbery of money from a Swiss plane landing at Oslo airport.
As Wisting keeps an authoritative eye on the expanding search, it’s Line who bears the brunt of the fury of the dark underworld, now awake to the fact that the robbery money has reappeared. Her interviews and the police’s main covert searches risk the lives of almost forgotten witnesses and players from 15 years ago.
Reviewed 19 September 2020 by Ewa Sherman
