"It was one of those days when people go around with faces like clenched fists and it doesn't take much to make them attack. The afternoon arrived slowly and late. As if it didn't want to show up at all.""Hamre sat on the law-abiding side of one of those desks everybody is issued with in offices that have the personality of a deoderant.""My head felt like a rotten orange somebody had stepped on....My body hurt, my face looked like a prop in a bad thriller.""February is a short-legged man somewhe...

Another highly enjoyable read by Staalesen. A very good crime novel that is someone driven along more by the characters than the plot. It’s an earlier book of his, #2 in the series but a fantastic read that delves into character really well. Varg is a lead character depicted extremely well, and you feel like he’s someone you may know in your own life etc. Definitely recommend the book.

Just didn't enjoy it. There are too many other really good Nordic Noir mysteries out there that I didn't want to waste my time finishing this one.I agree with the reader who said that Varg really didn't contribute much of anything to solving the mystery, that he was more of a wall that people talked at. I found the presumably Chandler-esque comments way overdone. Analogy upon analogy, almost as if the author was trying out multiple metaphorical references to see which one to keep, but then decid...

Varg Veum, convinced of the wife's innocence, investigates the murder of her ex husband in her flat. The plot itself is quite slim but I thought this was real Scandinavian noir. The writing is spare and to the point. Veum is an intriguing, contradictory character. On the one hand he is a romantic but he is also a violent man. He tries to eat healthily and runs but he also drinks too much. He is solitary but loves talking and the list goes on. Mr Staalesen also has plenty to say about social cond...

Synopsis: it was at their torture chamber that Varg Veum, PI, first encountered the gang's pathetic but deadly ferocity. There's a murder coming.

Solid-albeit predictable- Nordic Noir tale involving marginal detective Varg Veum who becomes embroiled solving a convoluted murder when an eight-year old boy hires him to find a lost bicycle. Yes, this smacks of 1940's kitsch, but Staalesen does work in some hauntingly memorable descriptions of the locale and his childhood even while he adds a hefty dose of sarcastic humor. Based on the number of physical altercations that Veum finds himself, you might expect that he'd be in ICU for and extende...

An early entry in the series (#2 I believe). Good read, but not great. Still recommended.

This private investigator sure has a lot to say. First in a series. Hope they get better.

Gunnar Staalesen is my new favorite author for mysteries. This one was a very complicated who done it, with a lot of getting beat up and hearts getting broken. I liked it very much.

Yours Until Death is the oldest of the Varg Veum books translated into English. He seems bit gruffer than in the more recent novels. That aside, this is a very engaging book. The story-telling is crisp and the writing is beautiful. Staalesen's writing is more straight-forward than some of his Scandinavian Noir contemporaries. He does not use the bleak landscape to set a mood, does not write crime books where the crime is a social commentary, but writes strong crime books where the crime is the c...

“Her eyes had turned almost violet… They didn’t look as if birds might fly out of them now. They looked as if they led to dark tunnels, to smoke-filled cellar rooms, to rooms with garishly painted walls, to opium dens. To villages deep in the jungle.”Yours Until Death by Gunnar Staalesen is about a private detective named Varg who’s hired by a young boy to recover his stolen bike. Varg soon finds himself intervening in the machinations of a menacing gang of delinquent youths that is terrorizing

Varg Veum is a not so successful private detective in 1970s Bergen, Norway. One day an eight-year-old boy named Roar comes to his office and hires Veum to find his bicycle which has been stolen by a local gang of teenage thugs. Roar lives alone with his mother but he doesn't want her to try to get the bike because the gang members assaulted the mother of one of Roar's friends who tried to get her son's stolen bike back. Varg meets leader of the gang, Joker, who appears to unstable and the situat...

An intensely introspective novel concentrating more on meanings in life rather than catching a killer. Maybe it's the influence of those long Scandinavian winters. Henning Mankell's Wallander novels have much of that same feeling. As a detective Varg (whose name means Outlaw and is a running gag in the story) chases a lot of red herrings and -- like Jim Rockford -- gets beat up a lot before stumbling to the right solution. This story is very different plot wise from the Norwegian TV episode I wa...

Yours Until Death – Norwegian Noir at its bestYours Until Death by the Norwegian writer Gunnar Staalesen was originally published in 1979 in his native Norway and in English for the first time in 1993 and now re-released by Arcadia Books and I think they are on a winner. More importantly he comes highly recommended by Jo Nesbø who calls him “A Norwegian Chandler” and having read and enjoyed this crime thriller I cannot disagree this is Norwegian Noir at its best.Gunnar Staalesen in Yours Until D...

I can see why in some mood and under certain conditions people may enjoy this story. It's a bitter story told in a bitter way that can ruin your day if you read it. It can also come off as needlessly verbose, not helped by the protagonist never turning off his noir speak or letting anything go by without a mental comment.If you came for "An unbearably tense novel of revenge, murder, bereavement" a murder mystery or a story about a community besieged by a teenage gang, you got the wrong book. The...

Philosophical private investigator. Too much philosophy for me.

Varg Veum: I recently read Big Sister about Veum's old age discovery that he had a half-sister and so many other ties of a newly discovered set of family ties and was very impressed. So I ordered Book number 2 and 5. For some reason I could not or did not order the first book. It is okay to just start with number 2: Veum is 36 in this one and enough of his complex character is revealed for me just to sample these two for now.8 year old boy ROAR took a bus across Bergen to Veum's low rent office

If you are a fan of the TV show, be prepared. The adaptation of this novel are very loose. This is a different Varg Veum that you are use to. The narration -- from time to time -- is tedious as it tries to embrace stream of consciousness, I think that is difficult to from Norwegian to English and pull that off. Regardless, the mystery is fun and well constructed. I will likely read the next one.

From my book blog www.JetBlackDragonfly.blogspot.comWhat a pleasure to find a new author, a new detective, and a new series from Norway. Perfect combination for me. I was in Mexico when I saw a dusty copy of Yours Until Death in a coffee shop. I had my doubts when I read on the back cover it was an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder concerning psychopathic teenagers and their 'torture chamber'. The novel is not close to that I was happy to find out - it's witty, clever and completely w...

Fails in many ways. Not noir, just sour; dismal weather, dismal view of society and a protagonist who has failed at a career, marriage, sobriety. Mostly talk and internal thought and very little action. Staalesen said in a Scotsman interview that Varg was "his take on Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer and Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade". Sadly, his take is so far off the mark to be an insult to those writers.Not the first of the Varg Veum series, but the first translated to En...