All over Oslo, children are disappearing.
One afternoon after school, nine-year-old Emilie doesn't come home. After a frantic search, her father finds her backpack in a deserted alley. A week later, a five-year-old boy goes missing. And then another.
Meanwhile, Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler, is buried in crimes of the past, trying to get to the heart of a decades-old false murder conviction that's been keeping her up at night. But Police Commissioner Adam Stubo, who's haunted by his own demons, sees her as his only chance at unlocking this deadly pattern. Johanne resists at first, but when the bodies of the missing children start appearing in their family's homes with notes that say, "You got what you deserved," she decides to help.
While the Norwegian media is out hunting pedophiles, Stubo and Vik feel that the truth may be a larger, more complex story of revenge, one they're desperate to uncover before time runs out. A singularly clever crime story combined with a serious discussion of children and our responsibilities towards them, What is Mine introduces one of the most original crime-solving teams ever.
From Publishers Weekly
The Scandinavian crime fiction juggernaut continues with Norwegian Holt's U.S. debut, a well-written if overly long suspense thriller set in Norway. The novel opens with the abduction of nine-year-old Emilie Selbu, the first of several such kidnappings, and the complex backstory of Aksel Seier, a man imprisoned in the 1950s for a young girl's murder and inexplicably released from prison eight years later. Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler now working as an academic psychologist, is looking into the Seier case when Det. Insp. Adam Stubo asks her to help out with the case of the missing children, which gets more intense when the body of one of them is delivered to his mother with a chilling note: "Now you've got what you deserved." Both plot lines are compelling, but the author expends far too much narrative energy on the backgrounds of her many characters, and the connection linking the cases feels contrived. Nonetheless, this first in a three-part series to feature Vik and Stubo is a thoughtful, deeply disturbing exploration of a heinous crime. (July)
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From Booklist
Starred Review Oslo University psychology professor Johanne Vik hardly misses the emotional chaos of her former career as an FBI profiler. The Norway-born divorcee still has plenty on her plate, caring for her mentally handicapped six-year-old daughter and researching the case of Aksel Seier, a Norwegian man imprisoned for crimes she suspects he did not commit. When a series of young Norwegian children are abducted, Johanne becomes consumed by dark thoughts of the deviant mind behind the crime. At first, she steers clear of the case, which is spearheaded by Police Inspector Adam Stubo, a hulk of a man softened by grief over the recent deaths of his wife and young child. But when two of the children's lifeless bodies are returned to their parents' homes with attached notes that read, "You got what you deserved," she and Stubo join forces to stop the vengeful perpetrator before he strikes again. Meanwhile, the case of Aksel Seier is never far from Johanne's mind. Holt is a former minister of justice, a lawyer and journalist, and one of Scandinavia's most successful crime writers. Her American debut (the first of a three-book series starring Stubo and Vik) is both an impassioned commentary on the responsibilities of parenthood and an engrossing mystery with an ingenious final twist. Add this to the growing list of Scandinavian crime writers now being published in the U.S. Allison Block
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