A Scandinavian crime series that doesn’t release episodes endlessly? Finally, some peace! The protagonist of Samuel Bjørk’s The Boy in the Headlights is severely troubled but otherwise a brilliant detective. The abundance of personal issues is a mandatory foundation for every Scandinavian crime novel, although brilliant detectives are relatively rare among them; they’re more often just diligent and hardworking. Okay, granted, Nesbo’s Harry Hole is genuinely brilliant to some extent, but in return, he’s an alcoholic. Based on all this, it seems that in the case of Scandinavians, intellectual abilities are directly proportional to problems—well, you can imagine what the situation is with poor Mia Krüger.
At the beginning of each episode, the girl is either suspended or undergoing psychiatric treatment. Sometimes, if she feels like it, she wants to slash her wrists, while being a heavy alcoholic too. But she’s likable otherwise. And for some reason, dang it, they always want to fire her from her job. The devil knows why. (However, her boss, the chubby Holger, always defends her.)
The Boy in the Headlights is not your usual template crime novel, that’s for sure; because it would be good if it were! But in this book, you’re bombarded with information from five different threads simultaneously, barely able to keep up, and you feel like you could use some brilliance yourself—because without a razor-sharp mind, you are unable to keep so many characters in mind.
Moreover, these characters in The Boy in the Headlights appear so rarely that you wouldn’t even remember them if your mind, this delicate mechanism, didn’t work with above-average efficiency. But sometimes, damn it, a bunch of unknown figures still pop up! Dum them!
Meanwhile, Mia Krüger, the brilliant detective, is incapable of any, absolutely any brilliant insights; she just nibbles on information like Aunt Maggie (or Peter Jakab*) on a slice of salami. Because just when she would finally figure something out with great difficulty, some damn other investigator always comes along with a stupid, petty drug case and confuses her thoughts! Or she’s just sleep-deprived as usual. (Sleep disorder, this is also one of Mia’s issues. in this way, I guess, thinking cannot really be that simple for her.
(Yes, the drug subplot, constantly buzzing around Mia like a busy little bee. Do you think it will lead to something? That surely leads nowhere. You just stare blankly, wondering what the hell it was all about.)
And then somewhere around here, you really realize that Mia isn’t actually brilliant, Samuel Bjørk just wants to make you believe it. But he doesn’t succeed at all, screw it!
There are series that manage to maintain roughly the same level of quality for ten episodes. The Mia Krüger series hit rock bottom by the third installment. The Boy in the Headlights is painfully boring crime fiction, where the story just wanders around like a headless chicken, and nothing follows from nothing. Random and ridiculously overcomplicated murders keep happening, leading to a clumsy and sweaty resolution.
And Mia Krüger? By the end, you’re damn tired of her too. Her problems already seemed exaggerated in the first two books, but there, everything was still believable because of the trauma she suffered. In Boy in the Headlights, nothing is believable anymore, just feeble, sluggish, and boring.
6,5/10
The Boy in the Headlights (Holger Munch & Mia Kruger #3) by Samuel Bjørk
384 pages, Paperback
Published in 2019 by Corgi