Blog Tour: Mirror Image – Gunnar Staalesen, translated by Don Bartlett

Bergen PI Varg Veum investigates two different cases that are uncannily similar to harrowing events that took place thirty-six years earlier…

Bergen Private Investigator Varg Veum is perplexed when two wildly different cases cross his desk at the same time. A lawyer, anxious to protect her privacy, asks Varg to find her sister, who has disappeared with her husband, seemingly without trace, while a ship carrying unknown cargo is heading towards the Norwegian coast, and the authorities need answers.

Varg immerses himself in the investigations, and it becomes clear that the two cases are linked, and have unsettling – and increasingly uncanny – similarities to events that took place thirty­six years earlier, when a woman and her saxophonist lover drove their car into the sea, in an apparent double suicide.

As Varg is drawn into a complex case involving star-crossed lovers, toxic waste and illegal immigrants, history seems determined to repeat itself in perfect detail … and at terrifying cost…

One of the fathers of Nordic Noir, Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1947. He made his debut at the age of twenty-two with Seasons of Innocence and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series. He is the author of over twenty titles, which have been published in twenty-four countries and sold over four million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, star­ring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Espen Seim. Staalesen has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour). Where Roses Never Die won the 2017 Petrona Award for Nordic Crime Fiction, and Big Sister was shortlisted for the award in 2019. He lives with his wife in Bergen.

My thoughts: this is another fascinating case for PI Varg Veum, with the present and past all tangled up. Berit hires him to quietly locate her sister and brother-in-law, who she says have disappeared. But Veum is interested in the suicide pact deaths of their mother and her lover, years before. Something isn’t adding up, is history repeating itself?

As he digs into the past and also searches for the missing couple, he has more questions than answers. Something strange is also happening at the missing man’s workplace – a shipping firm nowhere near a dock. A journalist has asked him to make a few enquiries into a ship, The Seagull, owned by the company.

As both cases weave themselves together and Veum seeks to separate them and get some answers, he’s almost killed. Accident or intent?

Gripping, thrilling, occasionally darkly funny, this is another fantastic outing for my increasingly favourite grumpy PI.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.