"The Seven doors" by Agnes Ravatn

An audio book.

Nina, a Literature prof, and Matts (doctor) live in Bergen, Norway. Their house is about to be knocked down - compulsory purchase. They've been there for 35 years. They'll miss their allotment opposite. Their daughter Innabor (who has a daughter Melia) need a new house too. Innabor and Nina knock on the door of a house they rent out to tell the tenant they're likely to want it soon. Nina does a talk about how literary scholars would make good detectives - it goes viral. The tenant disappears, leaving a box of her stuff behind. Nina discovers that Mari's been a violin prodigy. She meets Mari's separated husband, who's just become conductor of Bergen Philomonic. She says he's dedicated his first performance (of Bluebeard's Castle) to Mari. She meets her parents. They say that she left her 3 y.o. son with them, that they'd sacrificed a lot for her, that she'd given up her career and sold her violins and had been editing/translating instead. The father tells Nina that Mari and her mother didn't get on. The little boy's father isn't the husband, which is what caused the separation. Nina goes to the police, who've read the article about her. She explains that the Freudian interpretation of the opera (which mentions 7 doors) is male rage at female unfaithfulness. After 2 weeks, still no leads. Looking through Mari's notebook, Nina deduces that Mari was moody and interested in Freudian transference - was her lover a therapist? Nina reads that transference depends on a power difference. The more neutral the person with power, the more easily that transference is possible.

Mari's found in the sea. Her parents seem unemotional about it. Her husband said that Bluebeard was her favourite story.

Her husband reveals that she had cancer four years before. Matts reveals that her lover was his brother, an oncologist. She became obsessed with him, threatened to kill herself. His brother's wife doesn't know. Nina is angry, but accepts that revealing the fact will solve nothing. But shouldn't a doctor who exploits their patient be exposed? Then she discovers that actually her husband was Mari's lover. She accuses (with no evidence) her husband of drowning her in their bath, then dumping the body. He points out that nothing would be gained by getting him arrested. Their daughter may have overheard and called the police.

I don't like "Nina shakes her head inwardly" and there are at least 4 instances of "she thought to herself". I didn't believe in the husband.

Other reviews

• jenmed ( Each of the characters are flawed but the revelation of these flaws is slow and purposeful adding to the tension within the book.)
• Kim Evans (What follows is a readable, if predictable mystery tale. The story, and title, is inspired by the fairytale Bluebeard and its subsequent adaption into an opera by the composer Bartok. This fairytale is discussed at length several times by Nina and her close friend and sometimes feels like it’s being hammered home a bit too forcefully, so that any subtext just feels a lot more like text.)