Blind Goddess
The first book in Edgar-nominated Anne Holt's international bestselling mystery series featuring detective Hanne Wilhelmsen.
A small-time drug dealer is found battered to death on the outskirts of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. A young Dutchman, walking aimlessly in central Oslo covered in blood, is taken into custody but refuses to talk. When he is informed that the woman who discovered the body, Karen Borg, is a lawyer, he demands her as his defender, although her specialty is civil, not criminal, law. A couple of days later, Hansa Larsen, a lawyer of the shadiest kind, is found shot to death.
Soon police officers Håkon Sand and Hanne Wilhelmsen establish a link between the two killings. They also find a coded message hidden in the murdered lawyer’s apartment. Their maverick colleague in the drugs squad, Billy T., reports that a recent rumor in the drug underworld involves drug-dealing lawyers. Now the reason why the young Dutchman insisted on having Karen Borg as a defender slowly dawns on them: since she was the one to find and report the body, she is the only Oslo lawyer that cannot be implicated in the crime. As the officers investigate, they uncover a massive network of corruption leading to the highest levels of government.
As their lives are threatened, Hanne and her colleagues must find the killer and, in the process, bring the lies and deception out into the open.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
Anne Holt
Anne Holt was born in Larvik, grew up in Lillestrøm and Tromsø, and moved to Oslo in 1978. She graduated with a law degree from the University of Bergen in 1986, and went on to work for The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and then the Oslo Police Department, earning her right to practice as a lawyer in Norway. In 1990 she returned to NRK, where she worked one year as a journalist and anchor woman for the news program Dagsrevyen.
Holt started her own law practice in 1994, and served as Minister of Justice in Cabinet Jagland for a short period from November 25, 1996 to February 4, 1997.
In 1993 Holt made her debut as a novelist with the crime novel Blind gudinne, featuring the lesbian police officer Hanne Wilhelmsen. The two novels Løvens gap (1997) and Uten ekko (2000) are co-authored with former state secretary Berit Reiss-Andersen.
Holt is one of the most successful crime novelists in Norway. She has been published in 25 countries.
