Review - 'The Owl Always Hunts at Night' by Samuel Bjork

The Owl Always Hunts at Night is a Scandinavian crime fiction, the second in the Munch & Kruger series and my first introduction to it. It's dark, gruesome, suspenseful, and incredibly twisty. The beginning will instantly grab you, the premise of the crime is intriguing, and there were no lack of characters to suspect. It pretty much had me turning the pages until I reached the very end. That said, I feel like this book has some flaws that prevented me from thoroughly enjoying it.

With so many characters in this book, it's a little hard to keep up sometimes. It almost feels like there are too many, thrown in simply to up the suspect-count. It starts to feel a bit contrived, how everyone just happens to have connections to each other. Also, a lot of the characters have similar names--Marianne, Miriam, Marion--just to add to the confusion.

Speaking of characters, neither of the two main characters plus all the additional detectives on the team are particularly competent. Kruger is perpetually drunk and often on pills, sometimes while talking to suspects. In the course of an evening, she would go through like 10 or more drinks. It's a wonder she didn't keel over. I know she's a flawed character, but it's hard to be sympathetic to her when she can't be bothered to make any sensible decisions. She even interrupts suspects while they are answering her questions during interrogation. Munch seems confused and not sure how to lead the investigation, often ignoring relevant pieces of information as it comes in because he's too tired to care.

Really, all the detectives on the team are fairly scatterbrained, having to ask for clarification multiple times in each conversation, as if they don't even know what they are talking about. Every time new information comes in, even if it's information that they themselves requested, they still have to be reminded before they can remember. It's very odd and makes for really frustrating dialog.

This book is fairly suspenseful, but at times it feels like the author is trying to contrive even more suspense into it. For example, at one point, all the detectives watch a video and there is a part in there that shocks them! But then the book immediately switches to other characters' stories and we the readers don't see what that is until many chapters later. There's no reason for this. The book would be just as good if we find out discoveries at the same time as the detectives.

So all in all, while the plot of this book was enjoyable, the way it was written and the unlikable characters did take away from that.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars