The Hunting Game
“Oliphant!” he cried, leaning hard over the right side of the vehicle, picking out tracks in the sand. He tapped on the door, and we came to a whiplashing halt. Dam jumped down, checking a footprint, its edges corrugated and etched inside with smaller bubbles. He motioned, and Felix Marnewecke, the professional hunter and guide on this expedition, popped out of the driver’s side door. Strapping, ruddy, and blond, in his 40s, he seemed straight from central casting, wearing a cloth hat and shorts. He stood over the impression for a moment, a quizzical expression on his face, and nodded his head in agreement. If Nyae Nyae’s desert scrub is home to San families, it is also home to some of the last, biggest wild elephants in the world.
This footprint was proof. The rest of us unloaded, followed by the tracker they only ever called the Old Man, another tracker in training, and one more San, who was acting as a “game guard” to make sure the hunt was conducted in accordance with the conservancy’s rules and quotas. Last to emerge in that swelter was the client himself, an American businessman, who opened the passenger door and reached up to the rack for his gun, a 12-pound, bespoke.470 Nitro Express double rifle. These guns, costing up to $200,000, are favored for big-game trophy hunting because of their stopping power, and this is what he was here for, of course—a trophy. Two of them, actually. An avid hunter whose adventures had led him to Central Asia to shoot Marco Polo sheep at 15,000 feet and to Africa to shoot a leopard, he was now back in Africa for elephants.
From Charles Darwin and John James Audubon to Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway, the most enlightened hunters have long viewed themselves as naturalists and conservationists, committed to sustainability among animal populations and the preservation of wild places where they stalk game. The linkage has become inextricable. Revenues of hundreds of millions in federal excise taxes levied on hunters go directly to wildlife management and related activities each year in the U.S. And anyone who keeps a freezer full of venison is likely to tell you that the act of killing your own dinner in the wild is more humane than buying the plastic-wrapped meat of industrially raised livestock. But trophy hunting today, especially of the so-called big five in Africa (elephant, lion, leopard, rhino, and Cape buffalo), brings with it a larger set of moral and financial questions. The sport killing of animals beleaguered in the wild can arouse fierce opposition, even more so if the animal—Cecil the Lion, for example—is named.
Biologists estimated total losses of large mammals in protected areas on the continent at up to 60 percent between 1970 and 2005. As big game populations dwindle further under pressure from human encroachment, shifting climate norms, and widespread criminal poaching, there are hunters—the American client in Nyae Nyae, for one—who argue that a thoughtfully regulated and expensive hunt for bull elephants in their waning days makes a sustainable way to protect both species and habitat. On we went, following the footprints. Every so often Dam would retrace his steps, circling in the dust, until we slowed to a more careful crawl. Coming over a knoll, we saw them at last, Loxodonta africana—what seemed to be three bulls, munching on leaves and grass. Marnewecke reached for his binoculars, the American client took his rifle in hand. Everything narrowed to a nervous point.
African elephants live to be 60 or 70, and the biggest tuskers usually are older than 45. Tusks are measured by weight, and anything estimated to be over 50 pounds is considered a “shooter” by hunters. The client was looking for something in the 70-plus-pound range, but in the end these elephants’ tusks were too small. Marnewecke made his determination, turned on his heel, and began walking back to the Land Cruiser. No one seemed disappointed exactly: It was almost enough to have stood in the suburbs of such magnificent creatures.
Seen from the air Africa can appear as an illusion, rich velds and dramatic rifts, wide deserts and thundering rivers, these seemingly vast stretches of unfettered, unpopulated wild ostensibly forgotten by time and people. At a glance it could be a repository for all our ideas about wilderness at its wildest. And yet today no patch here goes unclaimed, whether it’s marked, monetized, or fought over. The animals that roam the land have become commodified, part of a new consumerism, marketed and sold, their brands pitted against each other, their continued existence now a question of human demand, whim, and calculation. Wild game is the continent’s version of crude oil—and it too will run out someday.
Trophy hunting—the killing of big game for a set of horns or tusks, a skin, or a taxidermied body—has burgeoned into a billion-dollar, profit-driven industry, overseen in some cases by corrupt governments. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa allow trophy hunting, with varying degrees of transparency and control, establishing yearly quotas meant to reflect the status of species and creating exclusions for highly vulnerable populations. South Africa, for instance, no longer allows hunting of leopards. Kenya has banned trophy hunting outright since 1977, and in Botswana, a comparatively wildlife-rich country, a temporary ban in government-controlled hunting areas went into effect in 2014.
“If you get rid of those conservancies in Namibia,” Packer says, “you’d probably get rid of all the wildlife and be left with cattle.” He says he and other biologists “are concerned with populations, and that’s an abstraction. That’s where the real conflict with the animal-rights organizations comes, because in their mind, Fifi must never die. That’s where the biologists can sound pretty heartless and cold.” For Packer, saving an individual animal misses the point; what’s crucial is protecting genetically viable populations as a whole. “I’m not against hunting. There’s got to be a middle ground,” he says. In his estimation, though, that middle ground isn’t exactly in the middle: He believes that trophy hunting is of marginal value as a large-scale conservation tool in Africa. In a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times countering the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to list lions as a threatened species, making it more difficult for Americans to hunt them, the Tanzanian wildlife director, Alexander Songorwa, stated that hunters on 21-day lion safaris paid government fees of up to $10,000 and pumped $75 million into the economy from 2008 to 2011. Packer says the 120,000 square miles of hunting areas in Tanzania need $600 million in investment every year, “and you’re not going to get that shooting lions for $10,000.”.
For some, the hunting-antihunting debate boils down to Western environmentalists trying to dictate their agenda to Africa—a form of neocolonialism, as Marnewecke puts it. “Who gives anybody the right, sitting in another continent, to preach to us how we should manage our wildlife?” Hunters make the point that with all the outfitters paying to operate in conservancies and with trophy hunters paying fees for the game they shoot, hunting indeed has made significant financial contributions to the continent, and to habitat protection, while all that antihunting forces have done is make noise. As for what happens to the hunters’ fees, that is notoriously hard to pin down—and impossible in kleptocracies.
And anyway, Packer says, when it comes to funding lion conservation, “it’s such an underwhelming amount generated by sport hunting, it’s no wonder that despite years of lion hunting being allowed in these countries, the lion population has plummeted.” The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which monitors animal populations, reports that the number of lions in five populations in Tanzania fell by two-thirds from 1993 to 2014. Yet hunters say they’ve helped fund everything from health clinics to schools to water wells to boots-on-the-ground assistance against poachers, all while leaving a lighter footprint on the land than the often cited alternative to killing game: wildlife-watching in the form of photographic safaris. The UN World Tourism Organization estimated that 35.4 million international tourists visited sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 and spent $24.5 billion. Operations designed to attract a higher-end clientele that craves a warm shower, big meal, and cool drink at the end of the day require infrastructure and equipment, maybe including a fleet of vehicles. There’s a danger, some hunters argue, that too many tourists will spoil the very experience they’re seeking. “The Serengeti is amazing,” says Natasha Illum-Berg, a Swedish-born professional buffalo hunter based in Tanzania, who, like Marnewecke, leads clients into the bush for “hunting experiences” and trophies. “The Ngorongoro Crater is a miracle.
All these national parks that are filled with minibus after minibus of photographic tourists—it’s fantastic,” she says, noting that the minibuses also put pressure on those iconic wildlands. “But what about the other areas?” she says. “How many people have been to the area I work in, that’s 500 square miles? This year maybe 20 people.” Without trophy hunting, Illum-Berg argues, there would be no antipoaching there, no management. “I keep on saying: Give me a better idea than hunting as long as it’s sustainable.” She adds, “The big question in the end is, ‘Who’s going to pay for the party?’ ”. Theologians were among the first to criticize such wasteful butchery.
By the late 1700s an anonymous British hunter had penned The Sportsman’s Companion, or An Essay on Shooting, advocating fair chase and setting forth “directions to gentlemen” in the field and forest, including limiting the number of game animals killed. Those rules were expanded and refined during the next century. In 1887 Teddy Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of influential American hunters who were worried about preserving swaths of their country’s wilderness and became instrumental in building the U.S. National Park System. In 1934 at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, some white hunters established the East African Professional Hunters’ Association. It promulgated a kind of honor code and pushed for laws and regulations, including a ban on shooting nearly all female animals and on shooting animals at water holes or near vehicles.
While the members worked to conserve hunting grounds, they also eliminated huge amounts of game from the continent. Today technology has taken a quantum leap forward, with drones, video of the hunt, and high-powered rifles equipped with laser range finders. Within the hunting community our hurry-up, have-it-all mentality—our ceaseless consumptive entitlement—has begun to manifest itself in troubling ways. Eschewing the time and cost of an African trophy hunt involving fair chase, some hunters have turned to canned hunting—the killing of often habituated animals in confined areas—baited hunting, herding animals with helicopters, or the shooting of their prey from the back of Land Cruisers. In Tanzania there have been reports of foreign hunters gunning down animals, including pregnant females, with AK-47s. In a hunting area called Loliondo that the government has leased long term to officials from the United Arab Emirates, local Maasai have reported transport jets leaving with game of all variety, dead and alive.
Social scientists writing recently in the journal Biology Letters describe a kill-and-tell generation of hunters exhibiting “show-off behavior” by propagating their own kill shots on social media, sometimes in poses that undermine the dignity of the animal whose life they’ve just taken. In South Africa, which has some 2,000 wild lions, canned lion hunting has grown into a more than $100 million industry, with in excess of 200 facilities raising about 6,000 of the big cats for easy killing. According to Ian Michler, a South African safari operator and photographer who investigated the canned lion industry for the 2015 documentary Blood Lions, the animals are caged and bred sometimes under terrible conditions. The young are taken from their mothers and brought to petting zoos. When male lions grow into adulthood, many are shot and killed for “hunting” fees that are much lower than the cost for a wild lion on a standard 21-day hunt ($5,000 to $15,000, versus $50,000 and up). And the trophy is virtually guaranteed. “It’s appalling,” Michler says.
“It’s perverse behavior.”. Canned hunting has another deleterious effect. While hunters happily take the pelt and head, and the claws and teeth once were sold in the tourist shops of Nairobi and Zanzibar, today the bones are most in demand—shipped to Asia either to produce traditional medicines or to be repackaged as “tiger bone wine,” made from crushed bones and Chinese herbs and marketed to the upper class as a health tonic and aphrodisiac.
This year South Africa authorized the export of up to 800 lion skeletons, and the worry among biologists, conservation groups, and animal-rights activists is that by legitimizing and allowing the trade, the country is spurring more demand for lion bones and more killing of the continent’s remaining 20,000 or so wild lions. “If we are not able to convince the majority of people that hunting is morally in order,” says Kai-Uwe Denker, a renowned professional hunter in Namibia, “there is no future for us.” In the face of bad publicity and bad behavior, some hunters have fallen back on an economic argument—that their presence in Africa provides jobs, that it’s a viable strategy for poverty alleviation.
But Denker disagrees. “I see a very big danger in promoting only the financial side. Livelihoods, income generation, job creation—this is an additional thing. You cannot justify immoral things with money.”.
When I met Denker in a valley in the Erongo Mountains, where he lives 25 miles off the grid in a house he built, he lamented the intrusion of humans on the African landscape. According to him, hunting, when done properly, brings you into “a conversation with your own death.” As we spoke in the shaded portico, the sun flashed off a blanched elephant skull set nearby, and the wind stirred the acacia, blowing away a certain noon deadness that often grips the desert. Time seemed to bend to the prehistoric. Tall and slender, wearing a torn shirt and short shorts, Denker is legendary for walking up to 40 miles in a day of hunting.
He also abides by a strict set of principles that includes hunting game, such as elephant and kudu, that have unfenced free range in historic habitat and shooting only older nonreproductive animals without fixating on large trophies. If it pays, it stays.
It was a phrase I heard over and over again, in myriad discussions about African conservation, in part to describe how money has changed the mind-set of rural populations regarding the value of big game. Too often people have seen an elephant destroy their annual crop, and some have known the pain of a lurking lion taking a child for food.
Here there’s no mythologizing or fetishizing, no fund-raising around a fuzzy face: The leopard is a killer, the rhino is a ruiner. To protect themselves against the enemy, villagers often shoot and poison these intruders, without an iota of sentimentality. And yet, the argument goes, if those animals are worth money to a local community, that community will work hard to conserve and protect its assets.
As fragile as it is, Nyae Nyae might be called a conditional success story, in part because the hunt quotas have been methodically monitored and increased over the years. On occasion cattle have threatened to overrun the conservancy, but the big game have returned, and the menu of animals offered to hunters includes leopard, kudu, and wildebeest, with prices set by a management committee of five members of the conservancy.
Profits are shared communally: Last year each adult over 18 in Nyae Nyae was issued about $70. “We have enough,” the chief, Bobo Tsamkxao, told me as he sat in his yard in front of a disintegrating house, his wives sitting in a row among children and litter. The arrangement also requires that the professional hunter employ and train local people and contribute toward development projects such as schools and health clinics.
Nyae Nyae became Namibia’s first conservancy, locally owned and run, in 1998. Every five years the conservancy is put up for tender, with professional hunters offering bids to the San for the right to establish an on-site operation. Last year the winning bid was more than $400,000, a rich number in large part because the elephants have become so big and valuable. The professionals sell hunting packages to clients to recoup the tender offer, cover expenses, and make a profit. Many operate on more than one conservancy; some string together enough to build their own little fiefdoms.
While Namibia has turned wildlife management over to the local population, governments in places such as Tanzania have taken an opposite tack, directly owning and leasing hunting grounds. Critics say that no country should be in the business of selling and profiting from dead animals. When coffers run low and funds are needed, they say, hunting quotas get raised without regard for the animals’ population numbers. And in those hunting areas where funds aren’t reinvested, there’s no wildlife left to hunt.
That could explain how 40 percent of Tanzania’s designated hunting areas have been emptied of game animals during recent decades. A promotional video that surfaced in 2014 shows a hunting company, Green Mile Safari, guiding hunters from the United Arab Emirates on a disturbing shooting party. The minister of tourism and natural resources said the party violated a host of laws by, among other things, firing automatic weapons, hunting female and young animals, and allowing a minor to hunt. The government banned Green Mile from conducting hunts in Tanzania in 2014 but reissued the company’s license last year, leading to accusations of corruption. No arrests were made, and Green Mile claims that the guide was at fault. In the Selous Game Reserve ecosystem, a prized trophy hunting destination, aerial surveys estimate the elephant population at some 15,000, down from perhaps 50,000 as recently as 2009.
“Why has the Selous been such a killing field?” says Katarzyna Nowak, a conservation scientist associated with the University of the Free State, Qwaqwa, in South Africa. “If hunters are coming in from all around the world, and you’re really pumping money earned from trophies back into the Selous for conservation and antipoaching, where have all the elephants gone?”. Craig Packer sees the conservation of African wildlife in practical terms: If hunters were shooting lions “for a million dollars and returning a million per lion directly into management, they would be on solid ground. But lions are shot for tens of thousands of dollars, and very little of that money goes back to conservation.” With two billion dollars a year we could save and protect the wildlife in Africa’s national parks, Packer says. But that would have to come from international partners such as the World Bank, eco-philanthropists, and nongovernmental organizations. Rise of the White Rhinos Nearly extinct in South Africa a century ago, southern white rhinos rebounded thanks to conservation efforts, limited trophy hunting, and the harvesting of horns, which regrow.
But with a recent surge in poaching, those rebounding numbers are leveling off. White rhinos are considered “near threatened”—they could face a high risk of extinction if conservation came to a halt.Monica Serrano, NGM Staff; Meg RooseveltMichael Knight and Richard Emslie, IUCN SSC African Rhino Specialist Group. Some trophy hunters say it’s not fair to blame them. Make of their sport what you will, they don’t set the fees or determine the quotas. And they can’t control endemic corruption in some countries, even if they indirectly feed it. Some claim to share the concerns of environmentalists who see collapsing habitats and dwindling populations. Kevin Reid, a big-game ranch owner in Texas, says he raises endangered African species not only for the sport of trophy hunters but also to create “a seed vault of animals,” including oryx and white rhinos, to help rewild Africa once its problems have been sorted.
“We’re trying to reverse extinction,” Reid says. In the never ending ironies of the issue, though, the near extinction of African elephants, rhinos, and lions comes today courtesy of the barrel of a gun. Perhaps, then, it boils down to another set of questions: In light of who we’ve become as a species, what new form has nature taken, and what new rules might be practiced there?
Might we owe it to the natural world, after bunging it up so badly, to act differently—less acquisitively, more generously—toward it? Might it now be time to stop killing the dwindling herds for sport and display? Or, perhaps more difficult to ponder: Will these trophies be all we have left someday, tokens of a wild nature we once knew? On the 12th day of the elephant hunt in Nyae Nyae, in the rising heat of the day, Dam, the tracker, picked up the marks of three bulls moving together.
Once Marnewecke and his client saw the elephants from a mile away, they knew they were big and approached them from downwind so as not to be detected. Two of the bulls were in front of them, but the largest and oldest stood apart and behind. So they maneuvered out around the others and came up on the third as he began to walk toward a clump of brush.
The client crouched low on one side as the old bull—sagging and on his sixth molars, half ground down already, which means he was well on in the last season of his life—unwittingly ate on the other side. Old bulls, says Caitlin O’Connell, a biologist and elephant researcher focused on how the animals communicate, are a font of wisdom, deciding when and where the herd will move in search of water, imposing an order on pachyderm society. “Contrary to myth, elephant bulls are very social creatures,” she says. “They move in groups of up to 15, and they maintain a strict hierarchy.
The older bulls exert a very important regulatory impact on the herd and an emotional-social influence on the younger bulls.” Younger bulls in musth, a heightened state of aggression during which testosterone levels can be 10 times as high as normal, will be more likely to fight each other when an older bull is absent. Two days later the hunting party found another big bull. The client fired a shot, bringing it down—but then, as another bull gave chase, he and Marnewecke ran for at least half a mile before the elephant lost interest in them. Eventually the process repeated: the flensing of the skin, the stripping of the bone, the feeding of families. With that elephant, Marnewecke’s quota for the year was filled.
His client flew home; the tusks of the two elephants would follow, destined for his trophy room back in America. I thought about those tusks in the weeks that followed, possessions now, totems of a fraught accomplishment. They were all that was left of two 15,000-pound sentient beings. Which brought me to Bobo Tsamkxao, the San chief, and his wives and children, and how they and others in the community would eat from those animals. And how they would receive money, at least indirectly, from those animals as well.
But something still seemed askew: a paying client killing a vulnerable animal to feed the San or conserve Nyae Nyae’s land. Even if hunting is in our genes, as Denker said, the essential question remained: Was it moral to kill such an imperiled creature at this moment in our history?
3.5 StarsI've always been a fan of Nordic Noir and strong female leads. I love that while Embla is a police officer, this is less police procedural and more about her life outside of it. And on a hunting trip no less. I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of hunting - however, I can see past it if the hunted actually get eaten and it's not just for sport. But let's get back to the book, shall we?At less than 300 pages, this book just flies.
Tursten builds at atmosphere surrounding Embla and the 3.5 StarsI've always been a fan of Nordic Noir and strong female leads. I love that while Embla is a police officer, this is less police procedural and more about her life outside of it.
And on a hunting trip no less. I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of hunting - however, I can see past it if the hunted actually get eaten and it's not just for sport. But let's get back to the book, shall we?At less than 300 pages, this book just flies. Tursten builds at atmosphere surrounding Embla and the hunting party she hunts with on a yearly basis and brings in death and an undercurrent of Embla's horrible history with men. I love the pacing of this book and how quickly I became involved with Embla.
While I didn't feel as connected with the crime aspect of this book, I did enjoy the groundwork on Embla's character as a start to a series that I think will just get better with each book.I didn't quite understand the reasoning behind the villain's actions - I felt this part was a bit confusing. I think this being the second book in a row where it doesn't quite make perfect sense to me dropped my enjoyability of this book just a tad. Overall I do enjoy this type of read and Tursten certainly brings some sparks to this fire.Those who enjoy nordic noir, the outdoors and a flawed but strong female lead with enjoy this outdoorsy read - there's nothing more chilling than being stuck out in nature with a killer on the loose.
I think fans of Camilla Lackberg and Camilla Grebe will enjoy this book - though it's a bit less dark and complicated. For now.Thanks to Soho Crime and Astoria Bookshop for this copy! I read this book to the end, so it held my interest in a tense sort of way. I have never tried this author's Inspector Irene Huss books, but when I picked this one up at the library I also selected one Huss for good measure.
Apparently there is a television series made featuring that character.There is no mystery in this book, as one knows what horrors await and who the perpetrator will be. There is also no way one can see a straight path for this new DI Embla Nystrom. I would say more, but no I read this book to the end, so it held my interest in a tense sort of way. I have never tried this author's Inspector Irene Huss books, but when I picked this one up at the library I also selected one Huss for good measure. Apparently there is a television series made featuring that character.There is no mystery in this book, as one knows what horrors await and who the perpetrator will be. There is also no way one can see a straight path for this new DI Embla Nystrom.
I would say more, but no spoilers from me on this new, in-demand book.The rugged outdoors setting for the moose hunting annual ritual is more interesting than the flawed characters who people this book. It also had a lively and promising start with Embla winning a boxing championship. I liked parts of this book—the depiction of the moose hunting season and the community traditions around it was interesting. And Embla is kind of an interesting character with her boxing and the dark secret from her past, although I didn’t think her character and motivations were fully fleshed out.
The setup is very slow (but then, that was the part Iiked) and the resolution/killer became fairly obvious. I don’t know if it’s Tursten’s style or the translation, but the narrative is very flat, I liked parts of this book—the depiction of the moose hunting season and the community traditions around it was interesting. And Embla is kind of an interesting character with her boxing and the dark secret from her past, although I didn’t think her character and motivations were fully fleshed out. The setup is very slow (but then, that was the part Iiked) and the resolution/killer became fairly obvious. I don’t know if it’s Tursten’s style or the translation, but the narrative is very flat, even at moments when the characters are supposedly feeling something (fear, sexual attraction, whatever). I felt the same about one of her Inspector Huss books that I tried, so I think this author is not for me. (This is somewhere between 2 and 3 and I rounded up for the moose hunting).
This book really brings back the memories of deer hunting in northern Minnesota. Although they hunted Moose there aren't that many left in Minnesota. Although I've been trampled on by Moose and had to chase them off campus in Duluth. Helene did her homework on this, didn't know anything about hunting.
Embla seemed to fit the picture of a rugged women who liked boxing and to go hunting with her uncle Nisse. Being a cop made the picture complete for her. When things got too messy with murder, she This book really brings back the memories of deer hunting in northern Minnesota. Although they hunted Moose there aren't that many left in Minnesota.
Although I've been trampled on by Moose and had to chase them off campus in Duluth. Helene did her homework on this, didn't know anything about hunting. Embla seemed to fit the picture of a rugged women who liked boxing and to go hunting with her uncle Nisse. Being a cop made the picture complete for her.
When things got too messy with murder, she was a take charge woman. Up to then she went along with the men in the hunt. She had a special way of finding out about the people in the hunt and arranged to have Nisse bale her out of situations. She fell in love with Peter, who had recently come back to the area, which she regretted later. I'll let you read the story which should interest the hunter in you.
I gave it 4 stars and would have given it 5, but the ending could have been move into the story for better understanding. This is a hard one to review because it starts slowly. More frankly there were SO many characters in the beginning that I was confused about who was who and who belong where and really wished that I was reading it in hard copy so that I could flip back and forth to check on things. Stick with it though and you will be rewarded with a good read and a terrific new character in Embla.
Hunting isn't my thing and (again) early on I was somewhat icked out by the body count of moose. Once the murders This is a hard one to review because it starts slowly. More frankly there were SO many characters in the beginning that I was confused about who was who and who belong where and really wished that I was reading it in hard copy so that I could flip back and forth to check on things. Stick with it though and you will be rewarded with a good read and a terrific new character in Embla. Hunting isn't my thing and (again) early on I was somewhat icked out by the body count of moose. Once the murders started, however, I was (I know, hypocrite) more engaged. There are some good twists, some turns, and it's notable for the portrait of Swedes in the woods.
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. Fans of Swedish noir will recognize some of the tropes. I'm looking forward to more. Helene Tursten is a good writer. This is not a good book, and that is 100% because of Embla, the protagonist. Embla is a reckless idiot, and entirely unbelievable as a police officer. First off, to fall into bed multiple times with someone who, from the first instance, she gets weird vibes from and even suspects of things is unprofessional and moronic - honestly it's such a conflict of interests she should be at minimum officially reprimanded and placed on leave.Second of all, to cover up the Helene Tursten is a good writer.
Deer Hunting Games Online
This is not a good book, and that is 100% because of Embla, the protagonist. Embla is a reckless idiot, and entirely unbelievable as a police officer. First off, to fall into bed multiple times with someone who, from the first instance, she gets weird vibes from and even suspects of things is unprofessional and moronic - honestly it's such a conflict of interests she should be at minimum officially reprimanded and placed on leave.Second of all, to cover up the fact that she did in fact fuck a dude she was essentially investigating, she decides to fabricate a rape claim for no reason other than she doesn't want people to find out they had consensual sex. Where is the fucking integrity? And just so it's clear, the entire thing is not a commentary on police corruption or anything of the sort, it's very blatant that we're supposed to excuse Embla's lying because the other dude did Bad Things and therefore a false rape claim is totally justified. Like, bitch no.
The Hunting Game Breda
You stymied your own investigation and lied and did things to jeopardize the investigation as a whole, and apparently have no qualms about lying during this inquiry in order to save your own ass.If you want to read about a Very Stupid and Not Capable Detective, this is the book for you. I guess we're supposed to like and forgive Embla because she's 'badass' and a competitive boxer or whatever, and therefore a Strong Female Character, but her incompetence, shocking stupidity, and selfishness are such huge, glaring flaws that she becomes completely unlikable and irredeemable.Oh, and to add insult to injury, Embla's entire vibe is the whole 'I'm not like other girls' schtick, which is highly irritating from a grown-ass woman in a professional role. 2.5 stars (rounded up)Two rich businessmen each receive a package with an item and a note on a slip of paper. Both notes read, “I remember. M.” But “M” is dead, so who else knows their secret, and who sent the packages?Embla is a Detective Inspector with the mobile unit in Gothenburg, Sweden. Every year, she takes a vacation to join her friends and acquaintances on a moose hunt.
Shortly after the hunt begins, peculiar occurrences start happening, and they reach a climax with two missing hunters. 2.5 stars (rounded up)Two rich businessmen each receive a package with an item and a note on a slip of paper. Both notes read, “I remember. M.” But “M” is dead, so who else knows their secret, and who sent the packages?Embla is a Detective Inspector with the mobile unit in Gothenburg, Sweden. Every year, she takes a vacation to join her friends and acquaintances on a moose hunt.
Shortly after the hunt begins, peculiar occurrences start happening, and they reach a climax with two missing hunters. As the remaining hunters search for their comrades, one of the dogs indicates he has found something at the bottom of the drop off. Upon further inspection, Embla discovers one of the missing men dead and floating in the water face down. Embla calls in for backup from the local police and her co-workers with the mobile unit. Instead of hunting moose, she is now hunting a killer.Embla is a new favorite fictional character of mine. She is a little bit edgy and very likable.
The other characters in this novel, though, are mostly not noteworthy. In fact, the culprit of the crimes is painfully obvious once s/he is introduced. The mystery in this story is mostly how all the details fit together, not “whodunit.” Unfortunately, this made for a pretty dull read. The writing itself is easy and enjoyable to read, but that could be the work of the translator. That's probably the only point that allowed me to finish the book so quickly. All in all, my experience with this novel is quite unremarkable.
It's not bad, but it's not good, either. I'll be quite surprised if any other books from the series are released in English. Thank you to Goodreads, the author, and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,Interesting mystery.
Embla is going on the hunt. Each year during the hunting season, groups of people go moose hunting. For some it is sport, but for others it is their food for the year.
The wealthy people have a big hunting cabin. Embla goes with her uncle and the same group that goes each year. This year they are joined by Peter.
He is a rich, technology man who has hunting rights and his year demands to be included. When one man is found dead in the lake and the other is missing, Embla Interesting mystery. Embla is going on the hunt. Each year during the hunting season, groups of people go moose hunting. For some it is sport, but for others it is their food for the year. The wealthy people have a big hunting cabin.
Embla goes with her uncle and the same group that goes each year. This year they are joined by Peter. He is a rich, technology man who has hunting rights and his year demands to be included. When one man is found dead in the lake and the other is missing, Embla takes charge as she is with the police. Several groups are formed to search for the missing man.
Peter and Embla are developing a relationship, but at times he becomes unexpectedly angry. I liked that Embla was able to save herself, instead of a man saving her.I do have one question.
Why when Embla has knocked Peter down and he is unconscious, does she not tied him up and call for help? The story would end then, instead of escaping through the forest. The last thing I need is another Scandanavian mystery but Embia Nystom is worth adding to my author's list. She's a prize winning Nordic welterweight and a Detective Inspector in a mobile unit out of Gothenburg, Sweden. As the novel opens she's about to embark on the annual moose hunt with family and friends. But, there is a new hunter in the group which brings the number to 13. And then strange things happen.
The only other woman in the group is bitten by a snake in the outhouse and incendents The last thing I need is another Scandanavian mystery but Embia Nystom is worth adding to my author's list. She's a prize winning Nordic welterweight and a Detective Inspector in a mobile unit out of Gothenburg, Sweden. As the novel opens she's about to embark on the annual moose hunt with family and friends. But, there is a new hunter in the group which brings the number to 13. And then strange things happen. The only other woman in the group is bitten by a snake in the outhouse and incendents continue until the dark pasts of many of the hunters is unmasked in a search for a killer. Looking forward to No.
2 in the series. I thought this book was the first in a new series, but had some odd feeling when I began reading that it was somehow familiar. I realized at the end that Tursten introduced the main character Embla in an earlier novel in the Irene Huss series. Embla was interning with the group where Huss was assigned. While that was in 2015, Tursten was working on a possible film scrip with Embla as the main character back in 2006.
In any case, my feeling of familiarity seemed to come from things read or read I thought this book was the first in a new series, but had some odd feeling when I began reading that it was somehow familiar. I realized at the end that Tursten introduced the main character Embla in an earlier novel in the Irene Huss series. Embla was interning with the group where Huss was assigned.
While that was in 2015, Tursten was working on a possible film scrip with Embla as the main character back in 2006. In any case, my feeling of familiarity seemed to come from things read or read about earlier. This book was not as long as some of Tursten's Huss series, but the focus on the tradition of moose hunting created a setting, an isolation, where the story could play out, as well as some incidents from the past to complicate the usual pattern of the hunt, and precipitate a series of possibly deadly incidents and a number of deaths.
There's something about a super cold, rainy, muddy forest Scandinavian setting with lots of high power guns, to get your anxieties going. The only 2 reasons that I read this book were (1) my wife brought it home from the library and offered it to me and (2) and it’s translated from Swedish and I’m a good deal Swedish. On the other hand it about hunting and I’m opposed to that.
And worse, it’s about hunting moose. Well, that’s the basis around which the murder occurs.It’s fairly well written, but the are parts that seem to lose something in translation.That’s all I’ve got without having to hit the spoilers button.Since it’s, I The only 2 reasons that I read this book were (1) my wife brought it home from the library and offered it to me and (2) and it’s translated from Swedish and I’m a good deal Swedish. On the other hand it about hunting and I’m opposed to that. And worse, it’s about hunting moose. Well, that’s the basis around which the murder occurs.It’s fairly well written, but the are parts that seem to lose something in translation.That’s all I’ve got without having to hit the spoilers button.Since it’s, I believe, the first book in a series about the female cop I may try another that’s not hunting dependent. Tursten kicks off a new Swedish murder mystery series based on a character from her previous Irene Huss series - this one stars 28-year-old, champion welterweight boxer, red-headed, somewhat haunted Detective Inspector Embla Nystrom.
She heads out on vacation on an annual moose hunt with her uncle and his hunting club, and trouble soon follows in the form of acrimonious relations between two members, a venomous viper in the outhouse, a sick hunting dog, and then. Murder of course! It's a page Tursten kicks off a new Swedish murder mystery series based on a character from her previous Irene Huss series - this one stars 28-year-old, champion welterweight boxer, red-headed, somewhat haunted Detective Inspector Embla Nystrom. She heads out on vacation on an annual moose hunt with her uncle and his hunting club, and trouble soon follows in the form of acrimonious relations between two members, a venomous viper in the outhouse, a sick hunting dog, and then. Murder of course!
It's a page turner (and not too explicitly violent). This is the new series from Tursten featuring a minor character from an Irene Huss novel. Trigger warnings if you do not want to read depictions of actual hunting- moose in this case. There are a series of accidents then murders during the hunting season and detective Embla- a prizewinning boxer and police officer, as part of the hunt, is on scene.
The book is short (around 280) and translated from Danish. I prefer her Irene Huss series. 3 This is the new series from Tursten featuring a minor character from an Irene Huss novel.
Trigger warnings if you do not want to read depictions of actual hunting- moose in this case. There are a series of accidents then murders during the hunting season and detective Embla- a prizewinning boxer and police officer, as part of the hunt, is on scene. The book is short (around 280) and translated from Danish. I prefer her Irene Huss series. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,I have always enjoyed reading Tursten's books so I was looking forward to this book. Regrettably, the title of this book does refer to a bit of psychological hunting; however, it also refers to a LOT of animal hunting.
I tried to push through it but ultimately gave up.In addition, this book felt less polished then Turstein's previous books. I don't know if this is due to the translator or if the choppiness is meant to reflect some of Embla's personality.