“It’s a legend, a story from the old days. If you’re out rowing and hear a splashing sound behind your boat, that’s the sea serpent rising up from the depths. You should never look back, just be careful to keep on rowing. If you pretend to ignore it and leave it in peace, everything will be fine, but if you look back into its eyes, it will pull you down into the great darkness. According to legend, it has red eyes.”

I’m very old and very wise, and therefore rarely surprised. Although I’ve sampled several Scandinavian mystery writers (the genre has suddenly taken off in the backwash of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy), I’ve mostly not been overwhelmed with them. Too polite, too depressing, too politically correct, and usually not well translated. But when Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back showed up cheap for Kindle one day, I took a chance.

I was surprised.

This is a very good book (and the translation is one of the best I’ve seen). In my experience, female authors generally have trouble writing good male characters, but for my money Fossum nailed this one.

She grabs the reader by the short hairs from the very beginning. The novel starts with one of those police situations which anyone with a touch of human feeling has to follow with fascination and a cold clutch of fear at his heart. I won’t tell you how that turns out, but it actually leads into the real central mystery of the novel, the discovery of a dead, fourteen-year-old girl, lying naked and almost unmarked next to a mountain tarn, an isolated body of water which, according to legend, is home to a sea serpent.

Fossum’s hero is Inspector Konrad Sejer (his last name is Norwegian for “Victor”), an aging, empathetic city police detective who lives alone with his dog and mourns his late wife. As he gets to know the victim’s parents, her friends and their families, and her boyfriend, he uncovers one secret after another. There are plenty of motives and plenty of suspects, and plenty of unhappiness to go around in the small mountain town that is the story’s scene. The dead girl will not be the last person to get hurt.

Although religious questions aren’t central (Sejer is agnostic, as is almost everyone in the story—which accurately reflects Norwegian life) it’s interesting that Fossum makes Sejer’s partner, Jakob Skarre, a believer of some kind. His gentle explanation of his faith to his superior, dropped in passing, seemed kind of wishy-washy to me theologically, but (in my opinion) added depth to the whole story.

I’ve already purchased another Inspector Sejer book. Highly recommended, with cautions for language and adult themes.

Lars Walker is the author of several published fantasy novels, the latest of which is an e-book, Troll Valley.