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Cream
Publisher:
Kagge
Release year:
2022
«Slick, raw, bloody violent and quick»
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The dramatic opening of “Tonedød” has striking parallels to Randi Fuglehaug’s first book in the series about the Bridget Jones-like journalist Agnes Tveit. “Fallesjuke” (2020) also opened in a spectacular way in Voss, where a parachutist died on the ground with half of Voss as spectators.
Now a year has passed. Agnes has quit as a journalist, and made a certain career with the book “The Fall”, which was about the parachute murder. She is now working on a commissioned biography of Marta Tverberg. When Marta is killed, the busy Agnes starts her own investigations, which will put her in danger of death.
Rawder and more intelligent
In addition to the crime debut «Fallesjuke», the former Dagblad journalist Randi Fuglehaug has had a resounding success with the youth book series «Halve kongeriket», written together with Anne Gunn Halvorsen. With her innocent, local color, there are aspects of her Vosse crime that are reminiscent of Camilla Läckberg’s “Fjällbacka series”. But Fuglehaug is a much rawer and more intelligent author. In an elegant way, she lets Agnes circle the victim’s life.
Phrasy, repetitive and superficial
It turns out that very many have had the motive to kill the bitter and possibly malicious older diva – famous in the rest of the world, but hated in his hometown. The type gallery is varied and clear, with many possible suspects. Among other things, a criminal couple and their suspicious and unsympathetic parents. Agnes herself gets help from her family, her best friend, the policeman Viktor, and her best friend Ingeborg, who is a hotel manager and single mother.
Parodic privacy
“Modern jazz – or, fear and horror, free jazz – was either hectic, incoherent and plunging music that gave her stress pulses and chafing on her brain, or endless and directional instrumental solos she had great difficulty not falling asleep to,” thinks Agnes then. she sits in the hall and listens to Tverberg’s concert. And that’s the tone of the book, sleek and humorous, bloodthirsty and quick.
Agnes herself has a privacy that borders on the parodic. She has a miserable love life after she broke up with her overly perfect medical partner in the previous book. She never exercises and has a penchant for fatty foods – here we might have been spared some of the recipes. She is curious, rude and free-spirited, with a penchant for sleeping with men she should not sleep with.
This has to be a hit
In the previous book, her private life became dominant, and the intrigue itself flowed, on the border of the chatter. “Tone death” is tighter and more unified. It will also be exciting over time, with an ending that is both dramatic, elegant and surprising.
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