Trapped in a snowbound Norwegian hotel as a blizzard rages and a murderer prowls, retired police inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen is reminded of one of Agatha Christie's most satisfying novels: "Twenty-four hours ago, there were 269 people on board a train. Then we became 196. When two men died, we were 194. Now there were only 118 of us left. I thought about Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. I immediately tried to dismiss the thought. And Then There Were None is a story that doesn't exactly have a happy ending."There's a definite Christie-ish flavour to Anne Holt's 1222, and the author has even described the book as a homage to the queen of crime.
The latest in the swarm of Scandinavian thrillers to hit our shores in the wake of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, it is distinctly less grisly than its predecessors, preferring to focus on the puzzle rather than the murders, and leading up to a wonderfully Poirot-esque I've-figured-it-all-out speech from Hanne.
After a train crashes high in the Norwegian mountains, the survivors, wounded but initially optimistic, battle their way through the snow to a nearby hotel, 1,222 metres above sea level. As the temperature falls and the tension between factions – a Muslim couple and a shrill right-wing television presenter, hoodied youths and shady businessmen – rises, people start to die, and it's up to Hanne to puzzle out what is essentially an icy version of the locked-room mystery.
Paralysed from the waist down after a bullet hit her in the spine, Wilhelmsen is as enjoyably antisocial as the best detectives always seem to be, while the presence of an armed guard on the top floor of the hotel, concealing something – or someone – which had been hidden in the sealed last carriage of the train, adds extra spice to the mystery. Holt depicts the mounting blizzard with a sure hand, the "snow so deep that there was no one alive who could remember anything like it", the "immense covering of air and frozen water that stretched from Hallingdal to Flåm".
