Dead Joker, by Anne Holt

The latest Hanne Wilhelmsen novel by Anne Holt is one of the most intense. Cecilie, her life-partner, is ill, and Hanne is confronting uncomfortable realities at home and at work. When a prosecutor phones the police to say that his wife has been decapitated while he was forced to watch, a series of events is set in motion: the man whom the prosecutor saw murder his wife turns out to be dead, a suicide some time before the murder. With a deceased suspect, the attention of the police naturally turns to the most logical alternative, the prosecutor himself. What follows is an unconventional puzzle mystery that will involve another murder, a murderer who is also a victim of child abuse, a ring of abusers and a ring of vigilantes, and a reassessment by Hanne of everything and everyone in her life.

Holt's novels are more focused on the lives, both inner and social, of her police characters than some in the Scandinavian crime wave, and sometimes the personalities of the detectives can be a bit distracting, imho. But in Dead Joker, the puzzling case and the personal disasters of the lead detective (though in no way parallel) add up to more than the sum of the parts. The end is in some ways inconclusive, but in its emotional truth, entirely satisfying.