Book of the week

American by Day by Derek B Miller (Doubleday) $37

A white American man writing the voice of a female Norwegian police investigator in a novel replete with race relations issues?

The potential for a cringemaking read is huge. But Derek B Miller, international relations specialist by day, crime fiction writer by night, nails it.

Undoubtedly the fact that Miller, founder and director of Boston-based research and development firm The Policy Lab, is married to a Norwegian and lives in Oslo helps. But that alone isn’t enough. Miller brings to his writing wit and humour, along with an ability to create real characters. He resists the temptation to caricature despite his upstate New York setting.

In this third novel he returns to Norwegian police chief inspector Sigrid Odegard, a bit player in his award-winning and critically acclaimed debut Norwegian by Night. Although then a secondary character, her role in its dramatic climax is significant and lifechanging (spoiler alert) when she shoots dead a troubled young man who comes at her with a knife.

She’s back at work and cleared of wrongdoing by an investigation – but not by her conscience. She takes leave, heading to the farm where she and her brother were raised by their father after her mother’s death from cancer. It’s a death for which her brother Marcus has always blamed her father and later himself – for reasons unclear to Sigrid. Because of this the family broke apart after her mother died; she and her father Marten are close but he and Marcus never fully reconciled.

Now Marcus is apparently missing. His recent letters to his father have stopped and Sigrid is dispatched to the US to find him. There, in the shadow of the Adirondacks, she encounters cowboy boot-wearing local sheriff Irving ‘‘Irv’’ Wylie. Typical redneck cop. Or not. Either way he has troubling news: Marcus was in

This is at once a clever, incisive study of contemporary America from an outsider’s point of view and a detective story.

love with a local black college professor, a politics of race specialist. She’s dead, he’s the suspect and on the run.

So the terrain ahead seems clear: outsider cop/sister needs to find brother and clear his name before American cops hunt him down. Not so fast. Derek B Miller is too good for that. This is at once a clever, incisive study of contemporary America from an outsider’s point of view and a detective story – who pushed Lydia from a multi-storey building and was it even murder?

This timely delving into the heart of America tackles racism, parochialism and a nation ravaged by gun crime.

Sigrid sets out on her journey with the view that America is ‘‘weird’’.

‘‘What is this freedom thing that seems to end all conversations with you people?’’ she asks Irv. But she comes to appreciate its complexities and contradictions.

Her long conversations with Irv about everything from divinity (he studied it) to racial violence plus their own lengthy monologues, some internal, at times threaten to overwhelm the narrative.

But every time Miller manages to pull it back – though occasionally, only in the nick of. It’s irresistible.

– Sue Green