Today I’m delighted to revisit my Five on Friday interview with author and composer Thomas Enger which was first posted in May 2019. It’s been brought up to date to include Thomas’s latest books.

Thomas Enger made his debut in 2010 with Burned, the first of five novels in the critically acclaimed Henning Juul series. Burned was shortlisted for the eDunnit award in England for the best novel that was both published as a hard back and in a e-book format in 2011. Movie rights for all the books in the Juul series have been sold to the Norwegian production company Cinenord. Thomas’s books are published in over 30 countries. He lives in Oslo with his wife and two children.

Over to Thomas:

Which five pieces of music/songs would you include in the soundtrack to your life and why?

Edvard Grieg: Piano concerto in A minor. Quite simply because it’s the most stunning piece of music ever written.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber: Phantom of the Opera. I went to see this in West End in 1989 (I was 14), and it changed my way of thinking about music completely.

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James Horner: Braveheart. Quite possibly the most beautiful and romantic movie score ever made.

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James Newton Howard: Snow Falling on Cedars. One of the most emotive and immerse scores I know.

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Hans Zimmer: Crimson Tide. Quite possibly the CD I’ve played the most.

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What five things (apart from family and friends) would you find it hard to live without.

Lipbalm

Our summer cabin in Stavern

Manchester United

My piano

Chewing gum

Give five pieces of advice to your younger self?

Read more books

Study at least one year abroad

Start playing golf a lot sooner

Spend more time with your grandparents

Don’t wait until it’s too late to ask important questions

Tell us five things that most people don’t know about you

I used to stutter/stammer a lot when I was young. Had a huge problem with it.

My first paid job was as a garbage disposal person at Oslo Airport Gardermoen.

I grew up listening to a lot of heavy metal.

When I was young I wanted to become a butcher (might explain a few things…)

When I was 16 (or maybe I was 17), I scored a goal from my own team’s half of the pitch.

Tell us five things you’d still like to do or achieve.

I’d like to live for a while in Paris or Copenhagen

Spend three months at a writer’s retreat in the Maldives (preferably during the winter)

Go see/listen to a Hans Zimmer in concert show

Take my son to see Manchester United at Old Trafford

Record an album with my songs

Thomas’s Books

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Henning Juul series

Burned (Book 1)

A BRUTALISED VICTIM IN THE WILDS
A solitary tent is found to contain the body of a half-buried woman. She’s been stoned to death. There are lash marks across her back. One of her hands has been cut off.

A LONE VOICE
Two years earlier internet reporter Henning Juul lost his son, Jonas, in a domestic fire. As he returns to work, physically and emotionally scarred, Henning struggles to escape this past and to be taken seriously again as a reporter – by his colleagues, his ex-wife and the police.

A MYSTERY IGNITED
Told to cover the story of the woman in the tent, he finds an increasingly dangerous trail and, despite an early arrest, he is convinced that the story is more complex than the police think…

Pierced (Book 2)

A Convicted Killer: Despite always maintaining his innocence, Tori Pulli, once a powerful player on Oslo’s underground crime scene, has been found guilty of murder.

A Loose End: Scarred reporter, Henning Juul, is contacted by Pulli, who claims that if Henning can help clear his name he can give him details of who was responsible for the fire which killed his six-year-old son, Jonas.

A Double Threat: Desperate to continue his own search for justice, Henning realises that the information Pulli promises is life threatening, to both of them and to others. As events take a deadly turn, Henning finds himself on the trail of two killers for whom the stakes have never been higher…

Scarred (Book 3)

An elderly woman is found dead in a nursing home. Bjarne Brogeland, who heads up the investigation, soon realises that they are on the trail of a meticulous killer who has developed a keen taste for revenge. A killer who has only just begun…

Trine Juul-Osmundsen, Norway’s Secretary of State and Henning Juul’s sister, is accused of sexually harassing a young male politician. As the allegations cause a media frenzy, Trine receives an anonymous threat telling her to resign. If she doesn’t, the truth about what she really did that night will be revealed.

Scarred reporter Henning Juul, finds himself torn between the two high profile cases. He wants to help his estranged sister, but as he digs into their past, he discovers memories that haunt them both. Memories of a broken home. Memories of a dead father.

As the two cases collide, both their worlds threaten to fall apart.

Cursed (Book 4)

What secret would you kill to protect?

When Hedda Hellberg fails to return from a retreat in Italy, her husband discovers that his wife’s life is tangled in mystery. Hedda never left Oslo, the retreat has no record of her and, what’s more, she appears to be connected to the death of an old man, gunned down on the first day of the hunting season in the depths of the Swedish forests.

Henning Juul becomes involved in the case when his ex-wife joins in the search for the missing woman, and the estranged pair find themselves enmeshed both in the murky secrets of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, and in the painful truths surrounding the death of their own son.

When their lives are threatened, Juul is prepared to risk everything to uncover a sinister maze of secrets that ultimately leads to the dark heart of European history.

Killed (Book 5)

Investigative journalist Henning Juul follows a dangerous trail to find his young son’s murderer, in the explosive, heart-breaking finale to the international, bestselling Henning Juul series.

Crime reporter Henning Juul thought his life was over when his young son was murdered. But that was only the beginning…

Determined to find his son’s killer, Henning doggedly follows an increasingly dangerous trail, where dark hands from the past emerge to threaten everything. His ex-wife Nora is pregnant with another man’s child, his sister Trine is implicated in the fire that killed his son and, with everyone he thought he could trust seemingly hiding something, Henning has nothing to lose … except his own life.

Standalone

Inborn

When a double murder takes place in a Norwegian village high school, a teenager finds himself subject to trial by social media … and in the dock. Bestselling, highly emotive and award-winning Nordic Noir…

What turns a boy into a killer?

When the high school in the small Norwegian village of Fredheim becomes a murder scene, the finger is soon pointed at seventeen-year-old Even. As the investigation closes in, social media is ablaze with accusations, rumours and even threats, and Even finds himself the subject of an online trial as well as being in the dock … for murder?

Even pores over his memories of the months leading up to the crime, and it becomes clear that more than one villager was acting suspiciously … and secrets are simmering beneath the calm surface of this close-knit community.  As events from the past play tag with the present, he’s forced to question everything he thought he knew. Was the death of his father in a car crash a decade earlier really accidental? Has a relationship stirred up something that someone is prepared to kill to protect?

It seems that there may be no one that Even can trust. But can we trust him?

Blix & Ramm series with Jørn Lier Horst

Death Deserved

Oslo, 2018. Former long-distance runner Sonja Nordstrøm never shows at the launch of her controversial autobiography, Always Number One. When celebrity blogger Emma Ramm visits Nordstrøm’s home later that day, she finds the door unlocked and signs of a struggle inside. A bib with the number ‘one’ has been pinned to the TV.

Police officer Alexander Blix is appointed to head up the missing-persons investigation, but he still bears the emotional scars of a hostage situation nineteen years earlier, when he killed the father of a five-year-old girl. Traces of Nordstrøm soon show up at different locations, but the appearance of the clues appear to be carefully calculated … evidence of a bigger picture that he’s just not seeing…

Blix and Ramm soon join forces, determined to find and stop a merciless killer with a flare for the dramatic, and thirst for attention.

Trouble is, he’s just got his first taste of it…

Smoke Screen

When the mother of a missing two-year-old girl is seriously injured in a suspected terrorist attack in Oslo, crime-fighting duo Blix and Ramm join forces to investigate the case, and things aren’t adding up … The second instalment in an addictive, atmospheric, award-winning series.

New Year’s Eve. The annual firework celebration is rocked by an explosion, and the city is put on terrorist alert. 

Police officer Alexander Blix and blogger Emma Ramm are on the scene, and when a severely injured survivor is pulled from the icy harbour, she is identified as the mother of two-year-old Patricia Smeplass, who was kidnapped on her way home from kindergarten ten years earlier … and never found.

Blix and Ramm join forces to investigate the unsolved case, as public interest heightens, the terror threat is raised, and it becomes clear that Patricia’s disappearance is not all that it seems…

Unhinged

When a police investigator is killed execution-style and Blix’s own daughter is targeted by the killer, he makes a dangerous decision, which could cost him everything. Blix & Ramm are back in a breathless, emotive thriller by two of Norway’s finest crime writers…

When police investigator Sofia Kovic uncovers a startling connection between several Oslo murder cases, she attempts to contact her closest superior, Alexander Blix before involving anyone else in the department. But before Blix has time to return her call, Kovic is shot and killed in her own home – execution style. And in the apartment below, Blix’s daughter Iselin narrowly escapes becoming the killer’s next victim.

Four days later, Blix and online crime journalist Emma Ramm are locked inside an interrogation room, facing the National Criminal Investigation Service. Blix has shot and killed a man, and Ramm saw it all happen. 

As Iselin’s life hangs in the balance, under-fire Blix no longer knows who he can trust … and he’s not even certain that he’s killed the right man…

Two of Nordic Noir’s most brilliant writers return with the explosive, staggeringly accomplished, emotive third instalment in the international, bestselling Blix & Ramm series … and it will take your breath away.