Every now and then I try out a police procedural hoping to understand why they are as popular as they are. I usually end up disappointed. Fossum's Don't Look Back doesn't break that trend. This particular book is especially "procedural". There's a mystery of sorts but sorting everything out just requires talking to a bunch of people a couple of times. I suppose that's what makes the genre "procedural". They go through the motions of interviewing suspects, then reinterviewing suspects, until they've got some sort of timeline.

My biggest complaint is the lackluster characters. Sejer seems to provide little more than a focus for the camera. What's his "character"? "Widower with a dog." That largely sums him up. None of the minor characters are handled any better. "Overbearing housewife". "Man-crazy young woman". Etc. The only interesting character is the journeyman policeman Skarre. And even there we only see the barest glimpses of a personality -- how happy he is to be called by his Christian name, how he used to be a taxi driver, etc. I know that this particular kind of book (i.e. one without any literary pretensions whatsoever) sacrifices everything else at the altar of Plot. But there are plot-driven books with better, more interesting characterizations in them.

The book ends with a couple of unresolved things. In more capable hands they might have felt like the natural dirtiness of life but here they just felt contrived.

For a veteran detective, Sejer makes several astonishing mistakes -- like wondering what exactly Raymond and Ragnhilde did together for so long.

Everytime I read one of these Scandinavian crime fiction books I can't help but think that the "Scandinavian" moniker gets them some extra, unwarranted, kudos. This book could very easily take place in America, for instance. If it did, would people be as enamored of it?