If the Owl Calls
A detective in Norway investigates a murder case in Sharon White’s atmospheric novel If the Owl Calls.
In 1979, Hans, an Oslo detective, grieves his wife’s recent death. He is assigned a case in the remote north, home of the indigenous Sami population to which he belongs. The case involves sabotage: during a Sami protest of the government building a dam on their land, a bomb went off, and the culprit blew off his hand and went into hiding. In a possible connection, a body—possibly connected to Soviet embassy workers in neighboring Sweden—is found in a nearby ravine. Meanwhile, Kathryn, a young American, spends time working on a farm owned by the family of one of the protesters, with whom she falls in love; she has a run-in with the Russian man that she keeps secret.
Raising questions about conflicting identities, as with Hans navigating being both part of a persecuted minority and Norwegian, the chapters alternate between Hans and Kathryn’s points-of-view. As Hans tries to connect the pieces, he confronts the Sami past he left behind. He reads a book about Sami culture by a relative, Johan Turi, and the letters of Emilie Demant, a Danish painter who lived with Hans’s family decades earlier, who helped Turi with his book. Emilie’s husband, Gudmund, was accused of being a collaborator during the war, and Hans investigates those claims, too. And while Hans never fully solves his queries, and his connection to Kathryn is quite loose, the novel’s treatments of the northern landscape are vibrant and evocative, as with mentions of stars scattered across the sky in the remote wilds and of the metallic gray of harbor waters and fishing boats “lined up on the horizon.”
With some elements based in truth, If the Owl Calls is an immersive historical mystery.
Reviewed by
Yelena Furman
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