Heine Bakkeid’s standalone thriller The Night Voyager and Thomas Enger & Johana Gustawsson’s SON, the first installment in the Kari Voss series, have been shortlisted for the Norwegian Sølvkniven, an award which honors Norwegian crime literature.

The jury had the following to say about each of the nominees:

“Boundary-breaking and nail-biting madness in book form, you can feel the chill take a firm grip on you as the pages fly by. /…/ The pitch-black plot makes this a wild reading experience. One can simply bow in the dust – The Night Voyager is Bakkeid’s best crime novel so far.”

“Excellent, a very thrilling and captivating story about processing grief and keep living after a tragedy. /…/ The plot [in SON] is masterfully crafted, with many subplots leading the reader off course, and the solution is far from easy to predict.”

Everyone here is lying…

Expert on body language and memory, and consultant to the Oslo Police, psychologist Kari Voss sleepwalks through her days, and, by night, continues the devastating search for her young son, who disappeared on his birthday, seven years earlier.

Still grieving for her dead husband, and trying to pull together the pieces of her life, she is thrust into a shocking local investigation, when two teenage girls are violently murdered in a family summer home in the nearby village of Son.

When a friend of the victims is charged with the barbaric killings, it seems the case is closed, but Kari is not convinced. Using her skills and working on instinct, she conducts her own enquiries, leading her to multiple suspects, including people who knew the dead girls well…

With the help of Chief Constable Ramona Norum, she discovers that no one – including the victims – are what they seem. And that there is a dark secret at the heart of Son village that could have implications not just for her own son’s disappearance, but Kari’s own life, too…

SON is the first installment in Thomas Enger & Johana Gustawsson’s Kari Voss series.

Thomas Enger (b. 1973) is a former journalist and number-one bestselling author of the Henning Juul and, with co-author Jørn Lier Horst, the international bestselling Blix & Ramm series.

Johana Gustawsson (b. 1978) is known as the Queen of French Noir, and similarly has a journalistic background. Gustawsson is a highly regarded, award-winning author, notably of the internationally bestselling Roy & Castells series.

They have each been published to great acclaim in twenty-odd languages. SON, originally written in English, kickstarts their first joint crime collaboration revolving around psychologist and police consultant Kari Voss.