I cannot help but dwell on the dazzling irruption of the new value of the inexhaustible nordic quarry for more glory of noir: Samuel Björk. The best hard-boiled novels, that term patented by the American ChandlerThey are now unfailingly associated with the writers of northern Europe. There where the cold invites you to retreat and the lack of light harmonizes sinisterly with the darkness of crime.
Because the Norwegian Samuel Bjork, which is being compared to Jo nesbo Due to its coincidental literary and musical aspects, it has managed to present two new protagonists with capital letters of the genre through the front door.
The team formed by veteran researcher Munch supported by the incipient criminalistic career of Kruger It serves the cause of reinforcing the police aspect with these two props that interpenetrate, with their disagreements included, from their different prisms. The Bjork effect is underway, and the series of her Munch-Krüger novels aims to deliver plenty of good moments in that juicy crime-inspired read.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Samuel Bjork
The wolf
In good crime novels, causality and chance move us through the plot with the disturbing sensation that the crime has a pendulum effect with a maddeningly unpredictable cadence. Only the most ruthless murderer knows what is the mechanism that points to death as revenge and ill will from the deepest madness.
Badly closed cases pile up in the history of the noir genre in parallel with a reality that is not always capable of closing the circle around the wolf that enters again and again among the sheep to choose its prey. Intuition is the only thing left sometimes to be able to look for that moment of anticipation. Especially when the pendulum has started to move again waiting for a new harvest of innocent lives...
A farmer discovers the bodies of two eleven-year-old boys in a Swedish field along with a dead hare. In the diary of one of them there is a mysterious entry: «Tomorrow there is a full moon. I'm afraid of the wolf." Eight years later, the bodies of two other children are found in a field near Oslo.
Inspector Holger Munch, recently promoted to head of a new investigation unit, has just hired the young police officer Mia Krüger, who has dazzled everyone at the academy with her intuition. In the crime scene photos, Mia discovers a detail that has gone unnoticed until now and that does not bode well. And then two other boys disappear...
I travel alone
A macabre riddle about what kind of person can kill a girl and also lend himself to that, to offer a riddle to whoever finds the lifeless body.
Because that "I travel alone" written down on a poster that hangs over the hanged girl seems like the message that justifies the author of the death, the insane excuse, the gloomy argument of the murderous madness of someone so innocent.
Between Munch and Krüger they trace those intricate paths that try to solve the gibberish. The ruthless murderer and his ignominious riddle. Perhaps it is a game towards a series of serial crimes. Or maybe it's just an anagram or some other crazy tool.
The point is that, to make matters worse, the team of researchers is immersed in one of those critical moments in which MÃa suffers this disconnection from the world. The brilliant researcher and her typical destructive instincts ...
But perhaps precisely like this, in his worst moments under the well, he can understand what the hell someone thinks capable of taking a girl away and ending up exhibiting her hanging from a tree ...
The boy in the snow
In the black genre, the protagonists usually face the most effective criminal who seeks to fulfill his desire for revenge in the face of old traumas, blood debts, various psychopathies focused on groups of potential victims.
And yet not so many times do we run into the murderer just because, with the murderer without a plan who only moves to channel his instinct of animosity.
Who is capable of killing and finds his particular summary justice in the extraneous violence and knows that the best way to quench his hatred is to act randomly ...
Of course, from the perspective of detectives Holger Munch and Mia Krüger the matter takes on psychotic overtones. They don't know how to try to hunt down this new form of evil that acts completely improvised.
Anyone can die if they cross the killer's path at the worst time. But also, good old Bjor throws a bait from the beginning of the story that catches the reader and makes him shake restlessly clinging to that bait. We started traveling back in time, until 1999. What happened on a cold night of that year is linked to present events.
And we, readers, would like to launch a wake-up call to the bewildered inhabitants of the plot. Unless everything is a trick, a clever misdirection maneuver to make us believe that we know more than what the researchers are linking.
What is clear is that for the serial killer of the most improvised victims, he has a lot of room for maneuver to launch his ordeal at his two pursuers. He seems to know them very well and invites them to play in the most macabre of games, in which the death dice can end up marking the most unexpected move ...
Other Recommended Samuel Bjork Books
The owl
Probably the least magnetic novel so far, of those published in Spain, of course. This is the second installment (if the independent cases of Inspectors Munch and Krüger can be called that).
Pulling stereotypes regarding the dramatization of the murder, Bjork presents us with a troublesome young woman who appears dead in the middle of the forest, with the typical almost pagan scene of offering to the devil loaded with candles and surrounded by the feathers of some bird.
Of course, the sum of details provided by the murderer enables the orientation of the investigation. Once the nature of the feathers as those of an owl has been determined, the clues are oriented towards symbologies or proximity with these animals.
A novel in which Mia Krüger's inner journey to her hells is more shocking than the resolution of the case itself. Strangely, Mia seems to need that contact with evil to exorcise her busy soul, to understand that evil is not just something that corrodes her inside.
