Following the Bloodlines

Americans are fascinated by serial killers, and American culture usually depicts them in ways that play to this fascination. But doing so negates the truth: These murderers, while evil, are often fairly banal people who get caught because of their own errors, or stay uncaptured because of others’ mistakes. So I approached the Norwegian author Victoria Kielland’s novel MY MEN (Astra House, 194 pp., $25) with trepidation — especially given her aim to humanize the turn-of-the-20th-century serial killer Belle Gunness, who murdered and buried untold numbers on her Midwestern homestead before it was set aflame and she vanished.

To my surprise, Kielland succeeds. “My Men,” superbly translated by Damion Searls, is a portrait of a woman trying, and failing, to escape her punishing trajectory. Bit by bit, day by day, we see, and come to understand, what has made Belle Gunness a killer.

We meet her first as Brynhild Storset, a 17-year-old maid in Norway, miscarrying her baby after the father brutally kicks her in the stomach; then as Bella, a young, traumatized immigrant, realizing that “it was the same in America as in Norway — it didn’t matter, the world didn’t care about her”; and finally, stripped of hope, as obsessive, calculating, murderous Belle: “There was no one who reached out his arms for her and took care of her. And the longest movement of all was neither love nor desire, it was the butterfly wings in the garden, it was death, the eye always trying to make eye contact, the longest eternal flicker.”

James Wolff’s prior espionage novels, “Beside the Syrian Sea” (2018) and “How to Betray Your Country” (2021) — the first two novels in his Discipline Files trilogy — were very good but not top-tier. However, THE MAN IN THE CORDUROY SUIT (Bitter Lemon Press, 294 pp., paperback, $15.95), the last book in the trilogy, establishes him as a memorable voice in the genre.