Enclave 2016 detective book

Name: Enclave
Rating: 4.6 (10 reviews)

Enclave (2016, Poland)

Original title: Enklawa

In the middle of December, in a small town of Vestmanna on the Faroe Islands, young woman Poula Lokin vanished without a trace. A Danish police officer arrives to help with the investigation, but her presence causes agitation among the locals. On one hand, she is a symbol of Denmark still having an influence on the independent Faroe Islands, but also it is a signal that Poula is most likely dead. Nevertheless, the local close-knitted community sets out to the surrounding mountains to search for the missing teenager. Hallbjorn Olsen, a single father of Ann-Mari, is worried not only because it could be his daughter lost somewhere out there, but also he might have been the last man to see Poula alive. And "might" is the key word here, because he cannot remember anything from the evening or the night when Poula Lokin went missing. He met her briefly before getting drunk and now, he is unable to remember anything that happened to him in those key hours.

A crime novel by one of the most popular Polish writers of the genre, Enclave have an interesting setting in the small town on Faroe Islands, where, while there are a lot of problems, murders usually are a rare occurrence. That original setting, and a small community not prepared for what is about to be uncovered, is perhaps the best part of the novel. Apart from that, there are dozens of moments that make very little sense from narrative or procedural points of view. The author, for some reason, insisted on using the same trick over and over again, when at the end of the chapter there is some new detail revealed, but instead of a follow-up, he moved the narration to a different point of view. But the real problem is that about 90% of the book is just fillers that do not move the investigation forward, hastily built events to keep the tension, even though they have very little realism or value.

Can you solve a mystery like this one?

TRY IT YOURSELF ❱