Invisible Hands

Narrated in the first person by Kristian Wold, a detective for an unnamed Norwegian police department, Invisible Hands is an intense police procedural with remarkable depth. The book begins simply enough, as Inspector Wold is assigned to revisit the seemingly dead-end case of a 14-year-old girl who went missing a year earlier. He approaches it indifferently, expecting to find nothing new, but Wold’s visit to the victim’s mother leads them to develop a complex emotional relationship. While too many elements of the story are formulaic — the cold case plot, the beleaguered detective with a self-destructive personal life, etc. — the book has interesting and troubled characters, and is exceptionally well-written. This is a bleak, uncompromising, and unsettling detective novel.