Book Review: The Owl Always Hunts At Night by Samuel Bjork

There’s something about Scandi-crime fiction that sets it apart from the norm and the second novel in Norwegian author Samuel Bjork’s Munch and Kruger series exemplifies everything that is great about the genre.

Veteran detective Holger Munch is reunited with the singularly perceptive, but haunted investigator Mia Kruger for a disturbing case in which a teenage girl has been found dead in an elaborately posed crime scene.

Munch needs Kruger at the top of her game to solve this case, but Mia has her own demons to contend with and nothing seems to quite add up.

Told in short, compelling chapters that alternate between several perspectives, Bjork creates a unique, twisting, unsettling thriller that really epitomises the phrase ‘page-turner’.

And at the heart of it are two police officers whose own emotional battles are as enticing as the crime they are investigating.

Read as a standalone novel or as part of the series, the book works equally well. In fact, there is very little to fault in this Nordic crime thriller par excellence.