Djevelen holder lyset (When the Devil Holds the Candle) - Karin Fossum

A couple of teenage friends, Andreas and Zipp, are bored, without much to do. They go around bullying immigrants, stealing purses from women going on a stroll with their babies and breaking and entering in old ladies' houses. One of the last goes wrong and silly things start to happen. All the while the police and its detectives do nothing. That is basically the plot of lame and silly "When the Devil Holds the Candle" a novel just because the cover says it is a novel. It is 230-pages-long of stupid plot and character decision after stupid plot and character decision. None of the motives of the characters make much sense, and even if Karin Fossum tries to infuse them with lives and motives and justify bad decisions, it all ends up being risible, laughable, a bad joke. Even if the book is short, it could actually have been one forth, because there is so much padding and stretching without end that it makes things crawl to a stop. This is no crime/mystery novel. This is just a sad excuse of a book. The best: how the author tries to make the characters human The worst: everything else: it's a mess, the character's decisions make no sense, the plot is silly and worth of a rubbish bin, there is no mystery, there is no point to the whole proceedings Other options: any other mystery novel; if you want one with actual character development you can have Agatha Christie and Miss Marple; if you want them from the cold, you can pick from Camilla Läckberg to Henning Mankell; you can go Japanese and pick Miyabe Miyuki or Natsuo Kirino... Anything else but this. 1/10 (English translation by Felicity David)