Vesterheim Bokprat: The Lazarus Solution by Kjell Oda Dahl (Online)

Dr. Maren Johnson, Luther College’s Associate Professor of Nordic Studies and Torgerson Center for Nordic Studies Director, facilitates a regular bokprat (book group), discussing Scandinavian authors and Scandinavian life. The September bokprat features Kjell Oda Dahl’s novel The Lazarus Solution.

Summer, 1943. When a courier for Sweden’s Press and Military Office is killed on his final mission, the Norwegian government-in-exile appoints a writer to find the missing documents in this breathtaking WW2 thriller. Daniel Berkåk works as a courier for the Press and Military Office in Stockholm. On his last cross-border mission to Norway, he carries a rucksack full of coded documents and newspapers, but before he has a chance to deliver anything he is shot and killed and the contents of his rucksack are missing. The Norwegian government, currently exiled in London, wants to know what happened, and the job goes to writer Jomar Kraby, whose first suspect is a Norwegian refugee living in Sweden, whose past is as horrifying as the events still to come… Both classic crime and a stunning exposé of Norwegian agents in Stockholm during the Second World War, The Lazarus Solution is a compulsive, complex, richly authentic historical thriller from one of the godfathers of Nordic Noir.