A review by medievalfantasyqueen
Hour of the Wolf by Håkan Nesser

3.5

I don't normally foray into the territory of crime fiction too much precisely because I have been disappointed by the same narratives repeating themselves, over and over again. Sometimes, some novels do make me wonder if they would have worked better if they were shorter. And this, which came with my collection from Novellix, is precisely why and how crime fiction sometimes works amazingly well when it is short. Nesser does a great job by springing into action almost immediately, and the reader is introduced to the protagonist and the conflict. The central conflict of the story revolves around a married man, Maarten, and his wife, Marlene, and a newcomer Maarten meets in a bar. Marlene is keeping a dark secret and Maarten knows it exists but decides not to probe into it. However, when Maarten encounters a man called David Perowne, he realises that it is high time that he faces this 'darkness' and soon, everything escalates. Who is telling the truth? Who is lying? Who is the one with an alternate identity? It is what you get when you cross a murder-fraud mystery with Harold Pinter's Betrayal. A great read; would highly recommend.