Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Serviceable Scandinavian crime fiction, which I enjoyed for its unsociable lawyer-detective heroine, its focus on cross-country skiing (I gave up my subscription to Eurosport a few years ago for budget reasons and still miss how much skiing you could watch on there), and its complex plot which subverted a few clichés (at least by the standards of someone like me who doesn't read a lot of contemporary crime novels). I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, as Holt's grumpy detectives seem to be rather Marmite characters, and obviously the sport angle is somewhat niche. (I don't think you'd necessarily need to be interested in skiing, though it was fun to spot occasional mentions of real skiers, like Ole Einar Bjørndalen, but in some sport enough that you could enjoy a novel about athletes, a governing body and its bigwigs as well as a background of public participation.)

It's been a few years since I read an Anne Holt novel - though this is my eighth, and the first of those, <i>1222</i> was one of the first ten books I <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/244282775">reviewed</a> on GR, back in 2011. Of Holt's other two main heroines, Selma Falck more similar in personality to Hanne Wilhelmsen than she is to Johanne Vik, which is a very good thing as far as I'm concerned. Vik would probably have been nice to be friends with, but as an investigator she grated on me because she was so anxious all the time (quite a good way to subvert a type, but it's so not what I want in a genre-fiction detective), and because she had young children, there were way too many cloying childcare scenes, one of my bugbears in Nordic Noir and other contemporary crime writing. Selma is distinctly un-maternal, separated, her teenager/young adult kids currently don't want to talk to her, and she and more or less admits that she got married and had kids because it was the normal thing to do and it didn't really occur to her not to. So even if they get back in touch with her in later books, they are too old for all those *barf emoji* scenes about looking after them and how darling the little ones are, blah blah. If writing is going to be plain like this, I need to like the content and characters. There isn't fancy prose here to win me over to other stuff.

There's also a lot going on in this novel for Selma personally, as well as in the complex plot. It's kind of an interesting character study, and could make a novel in itself without the mystery aspect. She is something of a celebrity - a former athlete (handball, which seems to be quite big in Norway) in her fifties who became a successful lawyer after her retirement but has also appeared on their equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing and kept in touch with contacts among the great and the good of Norwegian sport - but her life has recently fallen apart, as we meet her moving into a crummy rented flat. She is a fairly antisocial person who has successfully played an expected role for years, and who can still "switch on" when she needs to. There must be quite a few ways of interpreting this aspect of the character, but mine was as a woman with asperger's who is fantastic at masking, but has become fed up with it, perhaps because a crisis showed her what a façade she was living behind.

At times I got the feeling that Holt instinctively wanted to write another lesbian protagonist, like Hanne Wilhelmsen - but that perhaps she didn't want to be pigeonholed. The lesbian / masculine signals just kept appearing early in the book, such that if this were a novel from decades ago you'd assume the author was trying to write a lesbian character surreptitiously. There's team sports; her vice and fatal flaw is gambling, including poker and spread betting; the one prized possession she chose to hang on to was a prestige watch; the first mention in the book of anyone being attractive is when Selma observes it about her female client; she is physically courageous, including rugby-tackling a suspect. I noticed she is never actually defined as straight, but she had a long marriage to a man, says the only person she was ever really in love with was Morten Harket when she was a teenager - and among her oldest friends are a lesbian couple and their circle, so before her own marriage she wasn't lacking in normalisation for relationships between women. I headcanoned that she's bi and/or something like gray-asexual/aromantic. Anyway, book two is out next month in English, and a third was published a few weeks ago in Norway, so there's probably more to confirm or deny that by now. (And hopefully there isn't a sudden falling-for-a-RL-man cliché plotline. I think Holt can be better than that and I hope she is. She wrote a middle-aged lesbian detective in a wheelchair whilst making the point of it all about a stubborn misanthropic character, rather than representation for its own sake, so maybe it's not impossible that someone eventually talks about aro/ace to fiftysomething Selma, who thinks, 'hang on, that kind of sounds like me'.)

There are a few big crime-fiction clichés in the novel, like the Nordic Noir theme of high-level corruption, "something rotten in the state of…" (though I thought rather interestingly done, with the caveat I've not read any Scandi crime for a few years) - and that device where there's an old group photo of some friends or colleagues. But there were other more subversive features I liked, such as the refusal to add traditionally "likeable" and "feminine" traits to Selma, and certain things about how the conclusion panned out, which brought a bit of stubborn realism to the table. The plot is an intricate machine which, potentially, some readers might find too "busy" but which I liked a lot; there was always plenty going on, and an intricate sense of how a small country's elite networks operate. Novels often overdo material about writers, but here it never outstayed its welcome, certain stresses were very well described, and if you don't have a little bit of empathy with the character in question, I envy you your flawless record of personal organisation.

I'm not sure if it was me (I read this over about three weeks) or if the novel's mood changed somewhat as it progressed. At first I found the writing flat - though it was a good flatness as I was focused on other things and didn't want to be reading dense literary prose at the time - then it seemed as if that flatness it reflected the safe, ordered society of Norway - with its enormous sovereign wealth fund and the biggest public safety net in the world - whilst towards the end I was thinking it was really pretty good in its plain way, and better written/translated than Holt's earlier novels (even if there were still a few holes, and incidences of sledgehammer symbolism, like the Morells' fireplace). Near the beginning, the story and observations made me think about how crime fiction is often a way of reinforcing social norms: Selma is set 'labours' for her transgressions and has to give up a comfortable lifestyle; her homeless friend ex-police detective Einar is well outside them in his paranoia, his backstory, and his choices to live outdoors and avoid electronic devices, sometimes using a bin lid and literal tin foil as a barrier from them. (Perhaps the last was a dig at former Norwegian PM Gro Harlem Brundtland.) The novel's self-appointed moral arbite is a wealthy self-made management consultant, a very establishment figure and walking, breathing advert for social mobility (his upbringing in poverty perhaps meant to imply integrity). Yet by the end the narrative seemed more comfortable with the 'good' characters' transgressions, as long as they made *some* changes. 'Baddies' were marked out by wasting their chances or bearing grudges too strongly for too long.

There is implied to be a correct level of awareness of racism. Einar gets repeatedly told off for being paranoid about Roma and for referring to Hege as "the Chinese girl". Hege, adopted from China as a baby and now a champion skier in Norway's national sport, gets racist abuse online but says that as she was growing up, racism or her race never held her back. Racism means overt racism and it's implied to have only reared its head because of internet trolls. Cross-country skiing as an implicitly nationalist marker of Norwegian identity is raised in other paragraphs; the character of Hege is perhaps contradictory in that respect: her great talent for it disproves that, and implicitly proves the importance of nurture in high-level sporting achievement (undoubtedly in which sports one works at; inherited attributes for athleticism generally are never mentioned) - yet how much does she actually enjoy it? (Though that might be asked about athletes from many backgrounds who are likewise under the thumb of parent-managers.) Immigrants from Eastern Europe, meanwhile, only get to be servants and tradesmen. And it's implied that (structural) racism doesn't happen among liberal, cosmopolitan Norwegians - which makes the book seem quite dated in 2020 now that structural racism has gained such public awareness globally.

I had wondered if the title might be another Poe reference - one of the subplots echoes a Poe short story - but it turns out it's to a James Bond quote.

I put off reading this ARC for about a year, but when I could no longer deny I wanted to read a random crime novel, here was one I had an undeniable excuse to read, *and* with a non-police detective. (When I read <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/01/26/crime-tv-show-bias-criminal-justice-reform-color-of-change/">this article</a> back in January, and especially this line, "Police departments don't need hundreds of millions of dollars of free public relations," a penny dropped - it suddenly seemed absurd never to have thought of crime fiction across media from that perspective before - I had even described crime fiction years ago as being a sort of fantasy even if it doesn't contain dragons or elves. It made me decide not to read/watch any new police-based series. Crime fiction does still enforce norms and the idea that the justice system works, so it's perhaps a token gesture to read non-police detectives - whom I'd previously been less keen to read because they are less realistic, but at least it's good to be conscious of this new way of looking at one of the most familiar of genres.)

Anyway, I for one enjoyed this novel - the December setting made it a better read for autumn/winter than for its high summer time of publication - and it made me want to read the next in series, and especially see how Selma develops as a character.

Not the best book I have read, Anne Holt is new to me but have heard of her before, and I like the Scandi novels, but as I was reading I did feel that it went on a bit too long, I'm sure it could have been done shorter. As with all Sporting Assoc., there is alway's suspicion on doping, etc, as it was in this case.. Not one for outdoor sports and don't understand the rules and regulations so I did struggle a bit, perhaps it was not the sort of book I should have chosen, but there was one aspect to the book that somehow did not fit quite in perhaps there was too much going on. but a famous photographer gets abducted so that is another aspect to the story., the main protagonist, in this case, is Selma Falack and she has also done competitive skiing and is now a lawyer but has fallen from grace, lost her job, husband and son, the man who cost her her job always belives in 2nd chances and he has offered Selma a lifeline, she is a warm-hearted kind person but likes to gamble, her Judas., and he wants Selma to prove that his adopted daughter is innocent and she has failed a doping test which proved by a minuscule amount a substance called Clostebol which is a banned substance and was in her test results. The character of Jan Morrell I thought thinks his self highly evaluated and pompous, I could not seem to take to him, but his daughter Hege Chin Morrell and Maggi the housekeeper different kettle of fish, made you feel sorry for Hege but she is an adult at the age of 24. Quite a complex tale and perhaps are I haven't given the author justice or the best reviews as with all reviews they are personal, and we are not all alike. Would like to thank Netgalley and Atlantic Books for a copy for reviewing, as I'm sure there are others that would appreciate this long and complex tale.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Atlantic Books for an advance copy ofA Grave for Two, a stand alone thriller featuring former Oslo lawyer Selma Falck.

Selma Falck, former Olympic athlete, high flying lawyer and celebrity, is living alone in a rundown apartment when the author, apart from herself, of her downfall turns up looking for help and offering a kind of redemption in return. Jan Morell wants Selma to clear his daughter, Hege Chin, who is a world class cross country skier, of deliberate doping. Hege has recently tested positive for anabolic steroids and doesn’t understand how. The waters are muddied when Selma’s godson, another top skier, is found dead.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Grave for Two which is highly informative about cross country skiing and the politics involved but which, more to the point, is an engrossing read with plenty of twists and turns and an unexpected plot line. The novel is told from various points of view including a manuscript from the unnamed perpetrator and the thoughts of another unnamed man who is being kept prisoner for no apparent reason. Mostly, however, it concentrates on Selma. These different perspectives give the reader a wider view of events but I, personally, found it a bit annoying and frustrating to read the manuscript and prison accounts with no idea of how they fit in to Selma’s investigation until near the end of the novel. Call me impatient but I like to know. This minor moan aside the novel is a good read with a strong plot, a steady stream of developments and an unanticipated ending.

I found the skiing background extremely informative. It is not a sport I have any interest in but it is a large part of Norwegian culture. With Hege Chin having been adopted from China as a baby she is not stereotypically “Norwegian” and that leads to much discussion. It’s well balanced and topical in these days of nationalism. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the politics involved in doping. Ms Holt has a fine eye for motive and reaction so, sadly, her portrayal of the executives has a real ring of truth to it. I thought that the ending summed it all up perfectly.

I like Selma Falck and would gladly read more about her. Her fall from grace is spectacular as she is one of the most recognisable people in Norway. That it is self inflicted and she can’t see it makes her more human. Her journey to some kind of peace with herself is as compulsive as the plot.

A Grave for Two is a good read which I have no hesitation in recommending.

A good book, engrossing and entertaining. It's well written, with a fleshed out cast of characters and the plot is full of twists and turns.
I was fascinated by the setting and the mystery kept me guessing till the end.
I look forward to reading other books by this author.
Recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Anne Holt writes a riveting and atmospheric Scandi-Noir set in Norway amongst the background of the elite skiing community, featuring its star competitors and the National Cross-Country Skiing Federation that oversees the sport. Selma Falck used to be an elite sports competitor turned lawyer, but her career lies in tatters, she has hit rock bottom having lost everything, including her marriage to Jesso and her adult children, Anine and Johannes, who want to have nothing more to do with her, and lost her position as a lawyer. She is in the process of moving into a mouse infested dilapidated apartment in a unprepossessing part of the city, when she is visited by a rich former corporate client, Jan Morrell, who wants to offer her a second chance, but one with stringent conditions which offers her the opportunity to alleviate her mountain of debts. He wants her to exonerate his famous daughter of the doping scandal surrounding her.

Morrell's adopted daughter, Hege Chin Morell, is the apple of his eye, and an award winning skier expected to do well in the coming winter Olympics. Hege has failed a drug test, she had trace elements of the banned Clostebol, used extensively in the past by East German athletes. Hege, now shunned by those in the sport and the NCCSF, is a principled young woman, she denies using the substance, an ingredient in a cream sold over the counter at pharmacies. The strange death of another Olympic medal hopeful suggests that there is more to this case. Selma struggles to get a handle in her investigations, and needs the help of her best friend, ex-police officer, the homeless Einar Falsen. Falsen is an ex-client of hers, and her only real friend, the only one she can confess her sins and transgressions to. Skiing is a sport that makes up an integral part of what it is to be Norwegian, providing the nation with its sense of identity, is someone trying to sabotage Norway's Olympic Skiing medal prospects? In a story of multiple murders, a manuscript, corruption, dark connections, past and recent crimes come to light as Selma begins to get an inkling as to who the true victims actually are.

Anne Holt is a talented crime writer, she gives us a great sense of location and shines a spotlight on Norway's national obsession in cross-country skiing, and its adulation of its celebrity skiing stars. Its a fascinating and twisted world, and Selma, a deeply flawed woman, fits right into that world, she knows it well and has extensive contacts within it. She is not always a particularly likeable person, a woman confident, arrogant even, in her abilities to pull the wool over other peoples' eyes, a delusion common amongst addicts. However, this makes her of compelling interest, a woman conducting a dangerous investigation, whose personal life looks ready to implode at any minute. This is a complex crime read of revenge, with stand out characterisation, dark, intense and supremely suspenseful. A brilliant piece of Scandi-Noir. Many thanks to Atlantic Books for an ARC.