The Butterfly Effect

Igi Heitmann #1

by Pernille Rygg

It is a cold, dark, windy night in Oslo and Igi Heitmann pores over the debris in her dead father's office, trying to piece together the last days of his life as a failed private eye. She discovers a curious butterfly medallion in his desk - which in turn leads to the discovery of a young woman in a snow-drift, two bullets in her head and a gun in her hand. Igi's father and the young woman died within hours of each other - is the same person responsible for both their deaths? Igi soon finds herself in the role of detective, on a trail that leads to the city's underworld of corruption, sadism and child abuse. Caught amongst the shards of a dozen shattered lives, she must tread carefully is she is to reconstruct the violent and tragic truth and not be killed in the process.

Genres: Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Nordic Noir, Thriller, Novels, Mystery Thriller

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

At no point I disliked the book, but it was also nothing special...

[Adri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it in English. Quite a solid translation although there were places where the language did not flow nicely.

Interesting plot although there are some unresolved matters at the end - almost as if the author ran out of steam. Or maybe they were merely red herrings.

Quite difficult to follow a story when one is not familiar with the 'landscape' and it becomes cumbersome to constantly go back to the maps in the front.

One also deals with a different culture, which is interesting. The story moves along at a nice pace, but there were times when I felt displaced.

Nevertheless, it was a good read and I am not sorry that I have read it.

[M M · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Butterfly Effect propagates the usual misunderstanding about chaos theory, flapping wings and hurricanes. In this story set in a such a small dull town in Norway that living there must be like death, a girl’s body is found in the snow, riddled with bullets. The narrator, a sparky woman, determines that the dead girl had been her father’s last client; her father was a detective who had recently died in an accident. She is keen to find out if the deaths are in any way connected, and in the course of her slightly shambolic investigation, encounters corruption (what! in Norway? Impossible!) and bent psychologists. She herself is an interesting case: a psychology student complete with a troubled relation with her mother and married to a gay man, to boot. Her suspects are equally eclectic: a founder of a Wicca-like cult, property developers, druggies. As with the other Scandinavian storytellers of recent fame, Rygg wants to analyse the effect of psychological abuse on children and its ramifications on wider society. Small closed societies like Norway probably have scars in their psyches because everything one does is ostensibly obvious to one’s neighbours; but this close scrutiny drives evil deeper into hiding, and the consequences are therefore more corrosive.

[Jann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Igi becomes an amateur sleuth when she finds intriguing case files in her deceased father's office. When she sets out to return a necklace to Siv, whose name is on one file, it turns out that she is missing and no one has seen her recently. It is puzzling as the necklace had belonged to someone called Petra who had been a neighbour of Siv's in her childhood, but Petra had also gone missing many years before.

This much was enough to make me keep reading but I soon found the moodiness made it difficult, not to mention that Igi has problems of her own. She is very much in love with her husband Benny, but Benny is bi-sexual and his affairs are hurtful to her.

If I were to believe that the personages in the book were typical of the Norwegians I am sure I would be quite wrong, but it seemed that everyone had character flaws and most were extremely morose. Just like the butterfly in the title, the plot flits from scene to scene and I had to work to follow the action and frequently had to backtrack to figure out why one scene followed another.

It was an interesting read, but I can't honestly say that I enjoyed it.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

# 1 in the Oslo living Igi Heitmann mystery series. Igi is an under-employed research psychologist with variety of problems of her own including a transvestite husband spends more tie with men than her. She finds herself in the role of detective as she tries to piece together the last days of her private eye father - killed in a hit and run pedestrian accident. She discovers a curious butterfly medallion in his desk which leads her to a murdered young woman who died within hours of Igi's father. Are they connected as well as to the other deaths she encounters as she investigates. Igi is an unconventional young woman, who I found difficult to relate to, who must decide if the events confronting her have come about through accident or a sinister plot.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fast-paced Norwegian crime novel in which personable and unusual Igi, a psychologist with a gay husband, investigates her PI father’s mysterious death in a hit and run accident eventually connected to a young woman at the centre of his last case. A fiery finale in the snow wraps up a different take on a traditional plot of corruption and secrets. 3.5 stars.

[freyamorgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ⭐️
I was into it in the beginning and then it slowly lost me. I think it was a bit convoluted, but maybe that was just because I expected something more like the girl with the dragon tattoo and was sadly disappointed. It does have some bits of very good descriptive writing though!

[Elea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Auf eine gewisse Weise war das Buch schon spannend. Aber oft auch sehr weit entfernt von mir. Ich konnte mich in das Geschehen nicht so tief hineinversetzen und das Buch hinterließ letztendlich gemischte Gefühle bei mir...

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was not uncommon in the late 1980s and 1990s for writers to use ideas derived from chaos theory in fiction and in sociological investigations – and that was an important and pleasing development away from some of the more mystical notions emerging from physics and mathematics that had been used before then. I haven’t read any of those works for quite some time (although from time to time find myself going back to Ian Stewart’s excellent book about the mathematics of chaos, Does God Play Dice. I don’t remember a novel, however, that has used the ideas derived from chaos theory as well as this does.

At one level it is a fairly straightforward detective novel (of the hard-boiled loner variety) where Igi Heitmann, a research psychologist (and lapsed psychotherapist), becomes concerned about the seeming coincidence of her father’s death in a hit-and-run and the death-by-shooting of a young woman client, on the same day. Igi begins to follow leads, some that go nowhere, some that seem red herrings, some that develop in unexpected ways and take her in unexpected directions.

Along the way she makes reference to the ideas from chaos theory that influence her research as a psychologist, most notably the role that non-linear equations play in the controlled randomness of the mathematics of chaos. In short, non-linear equations mean that the solution to one equation in a sequence is independent of those that precede or follow it, so what has happened before is not a predictor of what happens next. That is, non-linear equations are a really good metaphor for almost any kind of research I have ever been involved in.

In this case it means that it seems like there are loose ends, which for followers of the genre may be frustrating, but for me makes the book a little more realistic even as it digs into realms that include corporate greed, lackadaisical (which looks awfully like linear-equation influenced) policing, family collapse, mystical religion and sexual violence. In most cases, the things that happen may be unrelated (and many of them are not) but many of the key ones are – it is just that we are not sure which ones are key. This is the power of Rygg’s writing; she is able to leave us inside Igi’s perspective, and in doing so leave us as uncertain as she is (although at the central moment of the plot development and solution to the crime(s) she gives Igi more information than we have.

Really enjoyable, not one of the greats but well worth it and a pleasant way to spend a cold winter’s afternoon.

[MrKillick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Der Klappentext preist dieses Buch als würdigen Nachfolger von Hoegs "Fräulein Smillas Gespür für Schnee", das hätte mich misstrauisch machen sollen. Keine Frage, die Autorin will hoch hinaus: Chaostheorie, Kritik an der klinischen Psychologie, skrupellose Immobilienhaie, Drogen, ein Sektenguru, Kindesmissbrauch, die Schwulenszene - alles vor dem Hintergrund des norwegischen Winters. Das ganze in einem Krimidebut, noch dazu in der ersten Person Präsens geschrieben.
Irgendwann hatte ich auch etwas den Überblick über die ganzen norwegischen Namen verloren - alles in allem ein Zeichen dafür, dass hier eine durchaus begabte Autorin in ihrem Erstlingswerk etwas zuviel gewollt hat. Manchmal ist weniger eben doch mehr.

Wenn ich könnte, würde ich 2,5 Punkte (oder vielleicht 2,75 Punkte) geben, da es einige gute Stellen gab, gut beobachtete Szenen und Charakterzeichnungen, so bleibt es bei einem "it was ok".

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this (probably a 3.5 really). I had read "The golden section" first which was probably a mistake as this one does explain the background a bit better, and the story precedes it. Igi is a psychologist who while not officially being a PI seems to have taken the role on following her father's death (her father having been a policeman and then a PI). Igi's marriage is unconventional (husband Benny is less evident in this novel than in its sequel) and she inhabits the fringes of a dangerous world, and takes risks, mainly alone. Her relationship with the police is not close. The setting is mainly Oslo and nearby, and as well as a sense of place (climate, a little description and some local colour) the social/political background is hinted at in passing (just a few things which are there for the reader who is looking for them but are not a major part of the plot).

[Sharon Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't help but wonder if Pernille Rygg's Norwegian novel 'The Butterfly Effect' seemed a bit jumbled to me because I had just finished the Swedish novel 'The Hypnotist' by Lars Kepler and both involve psychologist's and police. With the Butterfly Effect I felt I had to keep going back to double check which character was which, and who was who's mother or father etc. Despite this I still liked it better than The Hypnotist and will consider reading No.2 in the series and see how the story continues.

[Sae-chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is the first nordic novel I read. I quite like it, although sometimes I found myself get lost of what happened and had to re-read some pages back. Well, maybe that's only me. I come to like the name Yngve. Sounds dark and mysterious. Again, I believe it's only me.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intelligent Scandinavian take on a mystery novel, with dollops of chaos theory and complex systems thrown in. The translation is clear and readable, and the author has a good sense of the complexity of human behaviour and our ability to live with contradictions and cognitive dissonance.

[Betty · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was quite disappointing. The prose was 'clunky'- not sure if that is the fault of the translator. It was interesting to read a novel set in Oslo- but I didn't really find the main character convincing.

[Fenixbird SandS]

When I recently read a review of "A Sound of Thunder," Ray Bradbury's short story-into-movie...the terminaology for the "time warp" created the term "butterfly effect".....

[Alexis Debary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mysterious and captivating prose with uplifting spells of Skandinavian humour.

[Lia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting

[Melanie Clark · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of story in a little amount of book. I appreciated the pace, the humour and understand it is translated. I felt there were bits of storyline left untied which was slightly disappointing.

[Mindi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable easy read