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Bad Intentions: Book summary and reviews of Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions

An Inspector Sejer Mystery

by Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum X
Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum
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  • Published Aug 2011
    224 pages
    Genre: Mysteries

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Book Summary

In Bad Intentions, the newest installment in the Inspector Sejer series since The Water's Edge in 2009, Konrad Sejer must face down his memories and fears as he struggles to determine why the corpses of troubled young men keep surfacing in local lakes. 

The first victim, Jon Moreno, was getting better. His psychiatrist said so, and so did his new friend at the hospital, Molly Gram, with her little-girl-lost looks. He was racked by a mysterious guilt that had driven him to a nervous breakdown one year earlier. But when he drowns in Dead Water Lake, Sejer hesitates to call it a suicide. 

Then another corpse is found in a lake, a Vietnamese immigrant. And Sejer begins to feel his age weigh on him. Does he still have the strength to pursue the elusive explanations for human evil?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. While Sejer isn't as active as in earlier entries in this fine series, his distinctive presence still enriches the story." - Publishers Weekly

"...[F]or all readers of crime fiction." - Library Journal

"Norway's Inspector Konrad Sejer is less an agent or character than a brooding presence in this slim, penetrating tale of a falling-out among conspirators." - Kirkus Reviews

"I not only enjoyed it but admired it, too. I also found it playing in my head for a long time afterwards, the effect on the reader every writer surely longs for." - Sunday Herald (UK)

"The seventh Inspector Sejer novel from Norway's leading female crime writer is, like its predecessors, a gem." - The Guardian (UK)

"Few match her ability to conjure an atmosphere of emotional as well as geographical desolation." - The Times (UK)

This information about Bad Intentions was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Diane S.

Bad Intentions by Karen Fossum
Fossum manages to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of pages. Interesting psychological story about three friends who make a serious mistake which haunts them in varying degrees. Love these Nordic mysteries.

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Author Information

Karin Fossum Author Biography

Karin Fossum is the author of many novels and two collections of short stories. Her crime novels featuring Inspector Sejer have been translated into sixteen languages.

Don't Look Back is the first of Fossum's police procedurals to be published in the USA. The second in the series, He Who Fears The Wolf was published in 2005, and other translations of the series in English include Calling Out For You and Black Seconds.

Fossum has recently been honored with Gumshoe Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery/thriller. She lives in a small town in southeastern Norway.

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