Inverting the familiar focus of a murder mystery, The Murder of Halland establishes that a man named Halland has been shot outside his house but lets the investigation take place in the background while instead following his not-quite-widowed long time partner. More than once, in fact, she hilariously hangs up on the detective's phone calls to deal with what seem like lesser demands at hand in her house, subverting the expected focus and tension of the story. If it's cliché to say it's a novel in which "nothing is quite as it seems," the cliché is apt because this is a story of what may or may not be double lives, lies, secrets, deliberate omissions, etc. making it difficult — delightfully so — to know quite what's going on. The mystery here isn't Halland's death, but his life, and the life of the narrator he's left behind as she struggles through grief and confusion and delivers misdirections to other characters and to us, the readers. Those misdirections at times seem borne of incompetence or narcissism, but at other points seem calculated or even malicious, raising compelling questions about the privacy of victims and characters alike, and the ambiguity of something that seems as concrete as life and death. It's a story about possibilities rather than facts, as in this favorite passage:

Through the window I could just see the corner of the jetty where I had recently sat. As I pictured myself out there, a chill ran through me. An easy target for someone with a rifle in the gardens above the fjord. Who had shot Halland? Would that person also shoot me? Why wasn’t I totally preoccupied with this thought? Why wasn’t I frightened? The moment passed. No one would shoot me. No one would shoot Halland, come to that. But someone had.

Everyone seems to know something they aren't telling at the same time they know nothing at all, which may not sound like a very satisfying position to be put in while reading a novel, but in this case it very much is.