Hell Fire (Inspector Sejer Mysteries) - Hardcover

"What grips readers is the enormous amount of emotion [Fossum] works up as we get closer and closer to reliving the murderous event in question...Hell Fire is close to heartbreaking, and there are not many novels, thrillers, or otherwise, you can say that about."--Los Angeles Times

"A masterfully-plotted police procedural with strong characterization."--Crime by the Book

"Strong stuff...satisfying stuff."--Sullivan County Democrat

"Fossum's superb 12th Inspector Sejer mystery (after 2015's The Drowned Boy) opens on a hot summer day in 2005. Inside a disused recreational vehicle, parked in a cluster of trees in rural Norway, lie the bodies of single mother Bonnie Hayden and her four-year-old son, Simon. "Evil incarnate had snuck across the field and stabbed them with a knife," Sejer muses as he examines the crime scene. Flashbacks to December 2004 show Bonnie, a generous woman who cleans the homes of the elderly and infirm, performing her menial duties with stoic dignity. These background scenes also focus on another single mother, Thomasine "Mass" Malthe, and her intelligent but odd 21-year-old son, Eddie, who has trouble dealing with the real world. Fossum explores many themes--most notably, the cruelties of fate--in what is less a police procedural than a portrait of a society in crisis. Few readers will be surprised by the murderer's identity, but the slow, deliberate revelation of the story behind the crime is dramatic and heartbreaking."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED

A gruesome tableau awaits Inspector Konrad Sejer in the oppressive summer heat: a woman and a young boy lay dead in a pool of blood near a dank camper. The details of the deaths of Bonnie Hayden and her five-year-old son Simon are mysterious. There is no sign of robbery or assault. Who would brutally stab a defenseless woman and her child? Sejer and his fellow investigator Jakob Skarre begin a hunt for the killer that will eventually lead them to a heartbreaking conclusion.   In a parallel storyline, masterfully fused, Fossum tells the story of Mass Malthe and her troubled son Eddie as they navigate a relationship that some would call too close. Eddie constantly thinks about his unknown father — someone his mother would rather forget. When long-held secrets are revealed, it turns out that Mass and Bonnie share more in common than Eddie could have ever guessed.