Anne Holt's Modus - book & tv news

BBC Four will begin showing Modus based on Anne Holt's Vik and Stubo series on 26 November at 9pm. The DVD is released 19 December.

From Anne Holt's website:

BBC Four have officially announced that MODUS will be shown at 9pm on Saturday nights from 26th November 2016. The chilling Scandi crime drama fills the popular THE BRIDGE spot, and comes from the same director, Lisa Siwe. MODUS was the most successful Scandinavian TV series on Sweden’s TV4 in 25 years, with an audience of 1.2 millions. Adapted from Anne Holt’s bestselling novel FEAR NOT, it follows psychologist Johanne Vik as she investigates a number of disturbing deaths during a snowy Swedish Christmas.

The fourth book in the series, Fear Not (2011) translated by Marlaine Delargy, has been reissued today as Modus. Euro Crime has previously reviewed Fear Not and here are extracts from the reviews:

Maxine's review: This is an excellent book - in a couple of the previous novels in this series, the author has left things hanging in the air a bit at the end. This is not the case here. FEAR NOT is a fully rounded novel that addresses the terrorist and fanatical elements that plague our contemporary society, but elects to do so in an intelligent and engaging manner rather than by indulging in melodramatics. Having said this, the book is certainly not a dull lecture; to the contrary it provides plenty of conundrums that do eventually turn out to have plausible solutions. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, not least for its contemporary relevance in terms of its treatment of hate-inspired crimes, and very much look forward to the author's next. The translation into a naturalistic style is very good.

Lynn's review:  FEAR NOT is my idea of classic Scandinavian crime-fiction, rooted in social observation, and I loved it. As Holt said in a Guardian interview concerning Scandinavian crime fiction: "We don't write whodunnit books, but why did it happen [books]". With a pair of investigators who live lives aside from crime-busting; a solid, well-constructed mix of plot, mystery, character and coincidence that drives the whole thing along; a dark edge and of course - blood on the snow - we have the perfect Scandinavian crime story. In FEAR NOT Holt examines a threat greater than that of individual crime - the workings of organised hate-crime based on politico-religious beliefs. Anne Holt's background gives her a prime footing for writing such crime fiction: working for the Oslo Police, founding her own law firm, and serving as Minister for Justice between 1996-97. In another interview shortly after the shocking killings committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway, Holt referred to her book FEAR NOT as a book, although written two years before the Oslo bombing and the Utoya killings, in which she tried to explore "exactly the same issue as we now have to face, the line or the connection between spoken hatred and physical hatred. I really tried in that book to point to the fact that freedom of speech is also a question about responsibility for what we say and how we act".

FEAR NOT is a "what if" book that highlights the possibility of organised hate-crime, provides discussion of how such a thing can arise, and paints a picture of its effects and consequences with detail and humanity. It has an excellent English translation by experienced translator Marlaine Delargy, and if you are looking for comparisons, I would happily place it alongside books by Mankell, Marklund, Fossum, and Indridason as top Scandinavian crime-reads.