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Sejer discovers, as well, the extent of his own anxiety for his seven–year–old grandson Matteus, a Somali boy adopted by Sejer's daughter Ingrid. And here's where the psychology of the psychological mystery novel starts to go off the rails. Fossum had a nice–enough tale of mothers going, but she tried to make it a story of the universal adult worry about children. To some extent, she had to, since Sejer's empathy is supposed to be what allows him to solve the mystery. But the sentimental anxiety of grandfathers is not the birth–pang anxiety of mothers. Fossum knows that. "Ida's disappearance was like a net and it drew them all in," she writes of the sisterhood of mothers in the village. She lets the insight slip away, however, for no other purpose than to solve her plot problem and to show her fragile detective in a good light.

She needn't have tried, at least with the plot problem. Of course, in procedurals, the writer's ability to hide the solution matters less than in other sub–genres of mystery fiction. One whole set of procedurals—beginning all the way back in 1907 with the first of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke mysteries—even opens the story by telling the reader who did the crime. But Fossum intends the revelation of the culprit to be a surprise, and any reasonably competent mystery reader will see who it is on page 21, when . . . um, no, I won't reveal it here, but just read the page and tell me I'm wrong.

The earlier Inspector Sejer novels, particularly When the Devil Holds the Candle and The Indian Bride, probably deserved the acclaim they received, but this sixth volume doesn't promise much for the two as–yet–untranslated books in the series. In the end, what does Karin Fossum's Black Seconds offer? The chance to read a talented writer, yes, but otherwise just atmospherics without an atmosphere and mysteriousness without a mystery. It's not enough—as Agatha Christie would have known.

Joseph Bottum is the editor of First Things.

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