I keep an eye open for William Wisting novels by Jørn Lier Horst, although I don’t always choose to read them. Some can be fairly gruesome and I’ve found I prefer the cold case mysteries, which are usually less stressful! I recently read The Lake, which is Book 10 in the series and was published in November 2025. It’s about two cold cases and I really enjoyed it.
In a long, hot summer in Norway, Farris Lake is low on water. As the water recedes, more and more of the lakebed is revealed, and along with the usual miscellany of rubbish, evidence relating to two unsolved cold cases is discovered – the remains of a young man who went missing eight years earlier, and the belongings of a young Swedish girl who disappeared four years later.
Wisting had worked on the case of the missing young man and kept in touch with the family and their neighbours over the years. He’d always felt people knew more about the disappearance than they were saying, and now human remains have been found he hopes the police might at last be able to work out what actually happened.
The case of Annika Bengt, the missing Swedish girl, is more difficult, for the key piece of evidence found on the lakeshore by a detectorist, is just a small piece of jewellery. Annika disappeared while holidaying at a lakeside campsite outside Gothenburg in Sweden and the Swedish police always believed she’d been abducted and killed. But despite an intensive search they’d never found her body or any of her belongings. It might be a stretch to think the necklace could have been hers, but it’s distinctive, and the distance between Lake Farris and where she disappeared isn’t huge.
These chance discoveries mean both crimes are re-examined at the same time. Wisting’s team is joined by Ingrid Sandell, a Swedish detective who has come to Norway to help with the investigation. It’s not long before everyone is pulling on threads that may, or may not, be connected.
My verdict
Jørn Lier Horst was once a senior police detective, so you’d expect his novels to have a ring of truth to them, and I think they do. Nominally, the Wisting cold case mysteries are police procedurals, but you – the reader – actually end up finding out more about the people involved in the crime than you do about the police characters. Wisting is, of course, a central cog, but his police colleagues are peripheral and the author focuses on the motives and backstories of those connected to the case. It’s these human angles I enjoy.
In this novel, the detectorist who found Annika Bengt’s necklace is also trying to work out what might have happened. He and his wife use their holiday cabin on the lake shore every summer, and they had been there around the time the girl went missing. The case had been big news, which was why he immediately thought he recognised the necklace, and it’s his growing suspicion that he might know more than he realised which helps drive the plot forwards.
The story flips between the two cases and I found it absorb. At one point, Ingrid Sandell describes Wisting as conscientious, which sums him up pretty accurately. He’s a detective who works methodically but is also prepared to look beyond the obvious, so his doggedness and conscience often take him down a side-track. Sometimes that’s useful, sometimes it isn’t.
All in all, I found The Lake satisfying to read. It’s not fast-paced but it was still gripping and about three-quarters of the way through there’s a rather shocking development, which actually remains unresolved at the end. This is definitely worth 4 Stars.
Review by: Cornish Eskimo
What’s in a Star?
For Oundle Crime, 4 Stars means: “A good book with an interesting, layered story that you will still remember after a month.”
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