We Shall Inherit the Wind

By Gunnar Staalesen

Varg Veum takes on the perplexing case of a missing wind-farm inspector and gets more than he bargained for, as religious zealots, environmental terrorism and then murder take centre stage … The gripping next instalment in the award-winning Varg Veum series, by one of the fathers of Nordic Noir.

‘Not many books hook you in the first chapter – this one did, and never let go!’ Mari Hannah

‘Mature and captivating’ Rosemary Goring, Herald Scotland

‘Moving, uncompromising’ Publishers Weekly

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1998. Varg Veum sits by the hospital bedside of his long-term girlfriend Karin, whose life-threatening injuries provide a deeply painful reminder of the mistakes he’s made.

Investigating the seemingly innocent disappearance of a wind-farm inspector, Varg Veum is thrust into one of the most challenging cases of his career, riddled with conflicts, environmental terrorism, religious fanaticism, unsolved mysteries and dubious business ethics. Then, in one of the most heart-stopping scenes in crime fiction, the first body appears…

A chilling, timeless story of love, revenge and desire, We Shall Inherit the Wind deftly weaves contemporary issues with a stunning plot that will leave you gripped to the final page. This is Staalesen at his most thrilling, thought-provoking best.

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Praise for Gunnar Staalesen

'There is a world-weary existential sadness that hangs over his central detective. The prose is stripped back and simple … deep emotion bubbling under the surface – the real turmoil of the characters’ lives just under the surface for the reader to intuit, rather than have it spelled out for them’ Doug Johnstone, The Big Issue

‘Gunnar Staalesen is one of my very favourite Scandinavian authors. Operating out of Bergen in Norway, his private eye, Varg Veum, is a complex but engaging anti-hero. Varg means “wolf ” in Norwegian, and this is a series with very sharp teeth’ Ian Rankin

‘Staalesen continually reminds us he is one of the finest of Nordic novelists’ Financial Times

‘Chilling and perilous results — all told in a pleasingly dry style’ Sunday Times

‘Staalesen does a masterful job of exposing the worst of Norwegian society in this highly disturbing entry’ Publishers Weekly

'The Varg Veum series is more concerned with character and motivation than spectacle, and it’s in the quieter scenes that the real drama lies’ Herald Scotland

'Every inch the equal of his Nordic confreres Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo' Independent‘With an expositional style that is all but invisible, Staalesen masterfully compels us from the first pages … If you’re a fan of Varg Veum, this is not to be missed, and if you’re new to the series, this is one of the best ones. You’re encouraged to jump right in, even if the Norwegian names can be a bit confusing to follow’ Crime Fiction Lover

‘With short, smart, darkly punchy chapters Wolves at the Door is a provocative and gripping read’ LoveReading

‘Haunting, dark and totally noir, a great read’ New Books Magazine

‘An upmarket Philip Marlowe’ Maxim Jakubowski, The Bookseller

‘Razor-edged Scandinavian crime fiction at its finest’ Quentin Bates

• Language: English
• Publisher: ORENDA BOOKS
• Release date: May 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910633083

Gunnar Staalesen

One of the fathers of the Nordic Noir genre, 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-three titles, which have been published in twenty-six countries and sold over five million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Epsen Seim, and a further series is currently being filmed. Staalesen, who has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour) and the Petrona Award, and been shortlisted for the CWA Dagger, lives in Bergen with his wife.

Reviews for We Shall Inherit the Wind

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a well-plotted, well-written, and well-translated Norwegian crime novel that kept me turning the pages, and delivered a big surprise at the end. Staalesen wrote his first Varg Veum novel in the 1970's, and the series has been going strong since then (at least in Norwegian: at present only five of the sixteen novels in the series appear to be available in English). This, the fourteenth entry in the series, was released in 2010. It begins with a bang: the hero is sitting beside the hospital bed of his unconscious and gravely injured girlfriend, blaming himself for her predicament. How did things get to this point? That question is the engine that drives the story, and it works like a charm. We are presented with a cast of dour Norwegian characters with lots of old history connecting them, and with a very modern dispute about a wind farm, with personal and political ramifications. All of this unfolds in the vividly evoked landscape of western Norway, lonely and sea swept, but so interesting that I found myself checking out locations on Wikipedia. This is the first Varg Veum novel I have read, though I have seen some of the TV movies. It certainly won't be the last -- I just purchased "Cold Hearts" -- and I very much hope that more are translated.

[smik_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From the start of this story I could not get away from the feeling that I have read other novels where other authors have deal with this scenario: little girl goes missing from outside the house where she is playing while mother is keeping half an eye on her.The cold case that Varg Veum tackles revealed little about the child's disappearance during the original investigation, apart from the fact that the investigators felt there was something about the community that they weren't quite getting. The residents knew more than they were prepared to say and there was something "funny" about the cooperative community housing project. Now 25 years on, Veum finds that most of the couples are divorced and in the main they are more willing to talk. There are things they want to unburden.Coincidentally one of the former residents was recently an innocent passerby during a jewellery robbery in town. He was shot dead by one of the robbers during an altercation on the footpath outside the store. This coincidence ensures police cooperation with Varg Veum.This turns out to be only the first in a number of coincidences in the plot and a very different picture emerges of what happened to Mette. Varg Veum is middle-aged, a former policeman, a persistent and intuitive investigator who is not afraid to ask questions and to call in favours. He has a troubled past and an alcohol problem, but appears to be getting the better of it.Gunnar Staaleson has been a prolific Norwegian crime writer since 1993, with mostly only novels written in the last decade available in English. It appears that there are 18 in the series in Norwegian, 7 translated into English. This is the first one that I've read but it certainly won't be the last. Four are currently available on Kindle.

[rowingrabbit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Varg Veum is back with a cold case that has strange ties to the present. It’s been almost 25 years since 3 year old Mette Misvaer went missing from her yard. With the statute of limitations looming, her mother Maja asks Veum to take one final crack at finding the truth.It would be a welcome paycheque but before he signs on, Veum will need to make a few changes to his lifestyle. In the 3 years since his partner died, his only relationship has been with a bottle. If he can put the Aquavit back on the shelf, he might find some answers & perhaps a little self respect along the way.The book opens with an armed robbery of a jewelry store In Bergen. As the masked thieves flee the scene, a pedestrian is fatally shot. Police are unable to find or identify the culprits & the case is soon sliding toward the unsolved stack.What’s the connection? Well, you’ll have to sit yourself down & ride shotgun with Veum to find out how this one thread is elegantly woven into the main story. It’s not easy tracking down those who were part of Mette’s world. Some have moved on, same have died, some have secrets they’ll do anything to protect. But Veum is a persistent guy & his relentless questions soon unveil more mysteries than he bargained for. Staalesen excels at telling stories that are intricate & plausible. There are no bolts from the blue or hastily constructed endings. Every piece of the puzzle is uncovered through persistent digging & there’s almost an audible click as each slides into place on the way to a satisfying end. Violence is kept to a minimum as he chooses to employ Veum’s brains rather than brawn to find answers. It’s a refreshing take on the P.I. genre & more believable given he’s now a man of “a certain age”. He’s not exactly the poster child for healthy living & doesn’t bounce back quite as easily. Instead, he relies on quick thinking & a well placed verbal jab when trouble comes knocking. Veum is a complex, fully developed character who may seem to fit the hardboiled stereotype at first glance. But as you spend time with him, it’s his introspection & compassion that will stay with you. He’s not a bad person, just a lost soul doing the best he can.It’s a gritty & poignant story that flows at a steady pace until the jaw-droppers begin at the 3/4 mark. You’ll find yourself thinking about the nature of secrets, how they never really go away but just hibernate. And the longer they are hidden, the more powerful they become. It’s also a cautionary example of how easily we judge based on someone’s appearance or reputation. If you get to a place where you’re putting out book #18, you’re doing something right. Probably several things, as is the case with this author. His Bergen based PI has become a benchmark in the genre who fans have been following for 40 years & this is a clever, absorbing addition to the series.And hey, if you’re ever in Bergen, stop by & have your picture taken with Veum’s statue outside the Strand hotel near the fish market. He’s a looker.

[bsquaredinoz · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I occasionally wonder if authors of long-running series anticipate new readers with every book or assume that at some point they are writing for existing fans only. I wonder this because as a reader I am generally reluctant to break into a series that has hit double-digits long before I have read a single volume. There is, after all, just so much I can never know unless I go back to the beginning. But, being determined to read the shortlist for this year’s Petrona Award, I decided to have a go at the 19th book featuring Norwegian private investigator Varg Veum even though I’ve not read any of its predecessors.I did not immediately warm to the book’s central character and it’s because I suspect that was due to me never having ‘met’ him before that I was once again pondering the curly issue of the different kinds of readers authors have to consider. As a pretty dedicated fan of the genre I have come across many alcoholic misanthropes in the guise of detectives so was both jaded and resigned when encountering yet another one. There was enough back story provided here for me to glean the man was grieving the death of a girlfriend/wife several years ago but not quite enough to make me terribly interested in his aquavit-inspired stupors. And Staalesen’s models for his character are closer to the American, hard-boiled detective than my favourite fictional sleuths ever are. That said, by the end of the novel Veum’s determination and humour did earn my grudging admiration if not my undying love.Everything else about the book was terrific, particularly the story. Veum is asked by Maja Misvær to investigate the disappearance of her 3 year old daughter Mette. The child disappeared while playing in front of the suburban family home on a seemingly ordinary day in 1977. Nearly 25 years later the statute of limitations on the crime is all but expired but Maja Misvær is actually prompted to contact Veum when she hears that one of the men who was a neighbour at the time of her daughter’s disappearance was killed by jewellery store robbers fleeing the scene of their own crime. Soon, she worries, anyone who knows anything will be gone and she may have forever lost the chance to learn what happened to her daughter. This kind of cold case is always intriguing – there are probably few readers who don’t know of some local missing persons case that has gone unsolved – and Staalesen does a great job of peeling away the layers of secrecy that might easily build up in any group of people and result in an impossible to predict disaster.The Misvær family home is part of a small co-op, built by a well-known architect in the mid-70’s and this device provides both the suspect pool for the disappearance as well as offering an interesting way to comment on Norwegian society during this time period. In what seems like a series of utterly futile visits to each of the families who lived in the co-op when Mette disappeared (some are still there, some have moved away) Veum painstakingly teases out snippets that show what was being displayed to the world was not the whole truth about everyone’s lives. I think if I’d read a lot of this kind of thing when I was younger I might have scoffed at the lunacy being expected to believe people would hid such things even in the face of such obvious need to reveal the whole truth but that would have been due to my own youthful ignorance. I’m a little wiser now and I know that people keep all kinds of secrets for all kinds of reasons and I found this aspect of the book tantalisingly realistic. I also found myself wanting to stick up for our hero even though he wasn’t destined to be one of my all-time favourite sleuths. He solves two major crimes during the course of the novel and on both occasions police were very dismissive of his efforts and claim he stumbled across the solutions. Maybe so but an entire police force didn’t seem capable of solving either crime.I even got a surprise with the resolution of WHERE ROSES NEVER DIE which topped off a great reading experience for me. So I feel I must offer thanks to all of those who played a key role in providing this for me which in addition to Gunnar Staalesen includes the excellent translator Don Bartlett and English actor Colin Mace who was the terrific narrator of the audio version I listened to.

[ken5me5old5mate · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Would I have liked this book as much if it had been set in Australia? or Belgium? To be honest I don’t think I would have.

A standard crime/detective novel which offers nothing new or even interesting but it is well written and holds itself all the way through. I found some of it predictable and thought it was too formulaic and that held it back in lots of ways.

[atticusfinch1048 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We Shall Inherit The Wind – Nordic Noir at its BestWe Shall Inherit The Wind by Gunnar Staalesen is the latest in his canon to be translated in to English and published by Orenda Books. Who? Gunnar Staalesen is one of the best writers of Nordic Noir and it is not just me that thinks that, but real experts such as Jo Nesbo and Ian Rankin. This is not the usual run of the mill police procedural crime thriller, this is a private investigator called Varg Veum, whose name means wolf, who at 65 should really be winding down his career. Varg could cause a riot in a phone box without trying, while aiming to get to the truth, however unwelcome that is. I am no stranger to Staalesen’s Varg Veum and his style of Nordic Noir and what I like is that if you cheat and read the last chapter before you get there it will make no sense to you!What Gunnar Staalesen is excellent at is that he, like Agatha Christie, dots enough clues throughout the plot as well as a slight of hand so you might be able to work out the villain of the piece but will you be able to predict what the sting in the tail is? There is no telegraphing the plot it is carefully worked out and you need to take each chapter as they come, the descriptions he gives to people, places and actions deepens the imagery in your mind.Varg Veum has been given a job to find a missing person, someone who owns his own company as well as land that is mired in controversy. As bodies start to pile up, dead and alive, especially when Varg is around always makes the Police a tad weary of him. Up on the desolate coast line and outlying islands of Norway the Environmental movement are fighting against a wind farm, that besides giving electrical power, would also give much needed work and investment to an area of scant opportunities. All sorts of people have been attracted to the campaign both for and against, with the ever present threat of terrorism it is not until the first body turns up you really do not know who the good guys are.What Varg Veum does discover is that not everything is what it seems however hard you look, especially when this turns in to one of the hardest cases in his long career. He comes face to face with religious fundamentalism, careers riddled with many conflicts, some very dodgy business ethics that would make a banker blush.The reason why Staalesen is considered the best Crime Writer in Norway and has a stash of International Bestsellers to his name is packed in to We Shall Inherit the Wind; a love story, revenge and desire all the things a thriller needs. He proves why he is one of the best storytellers alive with a deft touch and no wasted words he is like a sniper who carefully chooses his target before he takes aim.If you want tough Nordic Noir then this Norway Crime Thriller will tick all the boxes, you are grabbed by the throat from the first chapter and not released until the last. This is a breathtaking wonderful crime thriller that will hook you and you will want to read more Staalesen and you will not be disappointed.