Third Sentence Thursday: DON'T LOOK BACK

Time to play Third Sentence Thursday, a blog game (somehow I prefer this description to "meme") hosted by Proud Brook Nerd.  Here are the rules: "take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like."

I'm reading another Nordic Noir (I love this moniker for Scandinavian thrillers/mysteries). Today it's DON'T LOOK BACK by Karin Fossum.

The third of the third:

He had four pieces of flat-bread stacked on top of each other with butter and sugar in between; his record was six.
 
The "he" in this sentence references to Raymond Lake (there's a mark over the "a" that I've never seen before, but I'm digressing). Raymond has Down's syndrome, and the book opens with him sort of kidnapping a little girl. Being kidnapped seems like one of those states that are akin to being pregnant: you either are or you aren't. Fossum employs ambiguity so well that it's acceptably unclear to the reader whether Lake is sinister, child-like, or possibly both.   

This third sentence is drastically different from last week's unsuccessful attempt. The writer manages to tell me that Raymond eats like this all the time, which says something about how he lives, that he likes sweet starches, and that he compares the levels of his sandwich to all the previous sandwiches he's eaten, like they're towers that are difficult to build. I'm envious of Fossum for this sentence, because it packs so much in. It's definitely the sort of sentence I want to emulate in my own work.

I'm about halfway through the novel, and it appears that the in-between kidnapping by Lake of a young girl is just a device to lead into the discovery of the body of a teenager. I'm really hoping that by the end, the beginning will be tied in more strongly to the main plot. Otherwise, the book will have been like an episode of "Law and Order": a series of thrilling events that are meant to lead you from one scene to the next, but that don't follow any of the events through to their logical conclusions. 

As a viewer, I feel like either the writers think I won't notice that there are gaping plot holes, or they don't care. Either way, I feel vaguely insulted. I'm really enjoying DON'T LOOK BACK, and I'm rooting for Fossum to not insult me in the end.  If you like mysteries, particularly Nordic ones, I'd recommend DON'T LOOK BACK. If the end is disappointing, I'll come back to update!

UPDATE: I've finished DON'T LOOK BACK. The ending is so ambiguous that I'm not certain who the killer is! It's got a good twist that pulls all the plot threads together, but I just can't understand why the author left the reader to figure out "who dunnit." Maybe it's a problem in the translation, but whatever the reason, you are now forewarned that the end of this book will leave you confused and contemplative.