The Missing Mystery

I must admit I've gotten lazy. I didn't realize how lazy until I saw the date of my last post (yikes!). It's not that I've stopped reading as much as fallen prey to the allure of the small screen.  I still read Anne Cleeves but I love Brenda Blythyn's Vera Stanhope. While I'm not too sure about the actor who plays Jimmy Perez in the Shetland series, it doesn't stop me from watching it. And while I've never read a single Morse book, try and keep me away from Inspector Lewis or Endeavour. My mission (at least while my series are on summer hiatus) is to catch up on both my reading and my writing, in spite of the attention craving, book-chewing hound of the Baranvilles. Consider this the beginning.
And where better to start than with a couple of my favourite Scandinavians. Yrsa Sigurdadottir's The Silence of the Sea opens with a yacht crashing into a harbour wall. The crew and passengers, a family with two young daughters, have completely disappeared and lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir is hired to sort through the legal mess. There's only one problem and that's because instead of letting the story unravel, the author spoonfeeds the reader what actually happens in alternating chapters. So, little mystery here...
Jo Nesbo's The Son has been out long enough that it's now out in paperback, the perfect format for hauling to a beach. Unfortunately, it's hardly beachtime reading. There are far too many characters (maybe you can remember them if you write them all down. And maybe not...). The lawyer, Einar Harnes. The cop, Simon Kefas. His wife. Her sister. The crime boss. Assorted inmates and henchmen. The priest. The prison governor. The assistant prison governor.  The girlfriend. And finally, the criminal, Sonny Lofthus. Though I really wanted to like the title character, he was just too cringeworthingly violent. 
But maybe it's not just that. Maybe it's that The Son misses a central protagonist-- maybe it misses Harry Hole. 

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?