Wild Shores

This is the second story in Maria Adolfsson's Doggerland trilogy and I hope she intends to write more than three. A fictional island state set in the North Sea equidistant between the UK and Denmark is a very enticing setting for dark goings-on.

This time most of the action takes place on Nooro, the most northerly and least civilised of the three Doggerland islands, and it’s also the family home of our lead detective, Karen Eiken Hornby. Karen was a detective in London for many years but after a personal tragedy she returned to her homeland and settled at Langevik on the main island of Heimo. There she lives with two waifs and strays, Leo and Sigrid, characters she reluctantly acquired during the first of the trilogy.

The action opens on Christmas Day with Karen, who is on sick leave due to injuries sustained at the end of her previous outing, wondering when she can get out of the festivities and start solving crimes again. She doesn't have to wait too long. A call comes through from her odious boss, Jounas Smeed, who asks her to take the ferry to Nooro and lead an investigation into the suspicious death of an elderly man. Half of the Doggerland force has flu and Jounas himself is about to catch a holiday flight to Thailand so Karen packs her bag.

The inhabitants of Nooro, whilst God-fearing, don't have the same respect for the law. And that goes for Karen's relatives too. Their livelihoods have been based on coal, then fishing and now whiskey.  And for fun they have the headquarters of the OP, the Odin Predators or the One Percenters (those involved in serious crime), a shadowy group of Harley Davidson/Hells Angel types, avoided by the law but they happen to count Karen's cousin as a leader.

The elderly victim, found in a remote quarry, is revealed to have once been a research scientist at the mainland university who might have discovered something that could impede the grandiose expansion plans of the main Nooro distillery. His grandson, Gabriel, works there and also likes to hang around with the OP. Naturally, he becomes a suspect, but when he is found with his throat cut after the New Year's Eve distillery party, suspicion falls on all the guests and Karen finds that she has to ask some penetrating and unpopular questions of her own family.

Doggerland is a small expanse of three islands, so over the holiday period Karen can make a couple of ferry crossings between Nooro and her home on Heimo – where the main sub-plot develops. I must confess I became more involved in the sub-plot of a hideous wife-beater than
the main whodunnit – not helped by the fact that I correctly guessed fairly early on who was behind it all. Nevertheless, DI Karen and her colleagues, friends and family are engaging characters and the atmospheric world of these fictional, but believable, islands carried me along.

There's an all-action finale and a very satisfactory, if slightly troubling, conclusion to the wife-beating sub-plot. This is a very well thought-out series. The lack of police officers has partly been explained by the fact that a serial rapist is on the loose, soaking up valuable resources, and it seems that this storyline will be the focus of Karen's next investigation.