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The game of mystery writing changed in the early 2000s. Author Stieg Larsson and his Millenium novels became so ungodly popular, it achieved to things: 1) it gave European mystery writers international recognition and 2) it inspired legions of authors to write their own epic, super-complex investigation novel. The Millenium novels were great for what they were: tremendously researched and outlined mysteries that challenged the way you thought about the genre. Stieg Larsson wrote Millenium with the desire to tell the best possible story about the socioeconomic state of Sweden. German author Nele Neuhaus, of the SNOW WHITE MUST DIE fame, seems to have written BAD WOLF in order to have her own Millenium. It's an over-ambitious, chaotic mess that stretches itself way too thin.
BAD WOLF, like most police procedurals, opens on the discovery of a corpse. A young girl is found dead, floating in the river on a hot June day *. The investigation of her death is centered around three women: Pia Kirschhoff, the lead investigator; Hannah, a career-driven show host who would do anything for a great story and Emma, a pregnant woman with marital issues. The young woman's murder is not your usual crime and it's also not the end of the cycle of violence surrounding the three women. Someone very different from your run-of-the-mill criminal is behind all this. Pia and her supervisor Oliver von Bodenstein (the recurring heroes of Nele Neuhaus' series) venture on a risky investigation that targets members of the high society that will change their lives.
I have never read Nele Neuhaus' breakout novel SNOW WHITE MUST DIE, so I've read BAD WOLF without any points of referrence about her work and maybe it wasn't the ideal novel to fall the Kirschhoff/von Bodenstein mysteries, because I thought it was a quite frustrating experience. The three main strands of the story don't manage to remain interesting and take turns to wallow into needless exposition. The character of Emma is particularly frustrating because she doesn't tie into the investigation until later in the novel and it's way too obvious where Nele Neuhaus is going with her. I plowed through about a hundred pages of exposition knowing all too well where the author went with Emma and it drove me crazy. I'm not saying BAD WOLF was meant for stupid readers, but if you have experience with thrillers, you're going to see right through it. Especially if you've seen/read the Millenium series. Consider BAD WOLF another, more low profile spin on the same ideas.
If unoriginality was the only problem of BAD WOLF, it wouldn't have been so bad. I mean, it's not the first novel that heavily borrows themes from another, massively successful one. The pages and pages of needless exposition meant to conceal the hollow core of BAD WOLF is what killed me. It's important to have layered characters that have something to lose in order to up the ante of your story, but when the piece come together so loosely, there is a point where exposition cease to serve its purpose and just hides that there is not all that much to figure out. I didn't like BAD WOLF. If you're a reader of this blog, I don't think you'll like it either. It's not a satisfying mystery. It only gives the illusion of being a complex police procedural and its story is deceptively simple and cliché. It's like what 311 was to the rap metal movement of the late 90s. What Zack Snyder's MAN OF STEEL is to Christopher Nolan's DARK KNIGHT series. A follower that relies on pattern recognition rather than its own original ideas. A very frustrating reading experience.
* Clichéééééééééééééé!!!