The Fifth Element
A Novel
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Police Inspector Odd Singsaker has been captured, imprisoned on an island off the Northern coast of Norway. He wakes to find himself holding a shotgun. Next to him is a corpse. But what events led him to this point? And how did he get here?
A few weeks earlier, Felicia, his wife, disappeared. Though he didn’t know it, she was trying to find her way back to Odd to reconcile, but then she vanished into a snowstorm. Possibly involved is a corrupt, coldblooded cop from Oslo, a devious college student who’s stolen a great deal of cocaine from drug dealers, and a hit man hired by the drug dealers who have been robbed. All of these lives intersect with Odd’s as he searches for Felicia.
The Fifth Element is ultimately the story of what happened to Felicia Stone. Within that journey, brutal crimes are uncovered, tenacious love shines through, and chilling characters with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to get what they want. Jorgen Brekke once again delivers a chilling thriller that readers will tear through to unravel what happened-and why.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in northern Norway around Trondheim, Brekke's stellar third installment in his Odd Singsaker homicide detective series (after 2015's Dreamless) is divided into four sections. Each part centers on one of the lead characters, and each is named for one of the Aristotelian elements phlegm, black bile, blood, and yellow bile once thought to ensure good health when in balance in the body. This narrative device is initially perplexing, but it all makes perfect sense in the end. Police inspector Singsaker, who's on medical leave after being wounded in a previous case, is suffering from the postsurgical effects of a brain tumor that will eventually recur and kill him. His American wife, Felicia, vanished weeks earlier, and readers must assemble the puzzle of her fate piece by often gruesome piece, up to a shockingly ironic close. Violence seems to be rapidly getting worse in today's relatively peaceful Norway, Singsaker concludes. For him, the horrors of this case which involves drugs, extortion, and spousal abuse outdo even the murderous exploits of the ancient Viking period.
