MURDER MINDFULLY
KARSEN DUSSE
TRANSLATED BY FLORIAN DUIJSENS
****
Calm your mind. Be here, now. Take a breath. And kill...
'I didn't kill anyone until I was forty-two. That's actually a little on the late side for my current professional environment. Admittedly, I did kill almost half a dozen in the week that followed.'
Björn has been given an ultimatum: repair his work-life balance, or his wife Katharina will leave him – and take their daughter.
He reluctantly starts a mindfulness class and to his surprise, it's a revelation. He becomes calmer, more focused, and he's starting to understand what's really important in life. So when his client and brutal crime boss Dragan Sergowicz tries to interfere with his precious family time, Björn remembers his new-found goal to find serenity – and kills him.
Now Björn can deepen his practice and seek inner peace – violently.
MY REVIEW
****
Murder Mindfully is already an international bestseller and a German series on Netflix, so I was excited to read the English translation out this year from Faber & Faber.
Björn, a criminal defence lawyer has been given an ultimatum by his wife to achieve a better work/life balance. He enrols in a class for mindfulness and soon finds himself employing those techniques as his world takes a sharp turn into murdering people.
This book is full of dark humour, and I think this I something a British audience can really get behind, so I imagine this translation will be a popular one in the UK. The juxtaposition of using mindfulness techniques in a murder and gang hierarchy situation is a great one and it’s such a fun premise. There’s a lot of strands and stakes running throughout and the read really gripped me as I raced through the pages, hoping that our anti-hero Björn would get away with murder.
I had a few issues with the writing, although it’s hard to know if this is down to the original author or the translation. At the beginning of the book, I found it a little hard to get into because of the amount of odd verbiage used. There are a lot of unnecessary words, and it felt like someone had relied a little too heavily on their thesaurus. For example, when describing an office: ‘it looked like it had just won an award in the antediluvian 70s’, the use of antediluvian here is an odd choice and jarred with the style of the rest of the writing. This did fade out as I got more into the story though.
I really loved the chapter headings which included a paragraph from the Mindfulness book which would directly relate to what the chapter was about. It was quite good advice, but it also made for a fun mini-spoiler for how the events were going to unfold or what might happen next. However, I didn’t like the fact that when this quote became relevant in the story, the same paragraph was then copy and pasted directly into the prose. I think if it had been paraphrased as a reminder this would have worked better than just a copy paste.
I really enjoyed the plot; it escalates nicely and in some places you really felt empathy to this murderer of a main character. However, sometimes his character came across as a bit too unlikeable – especially with how he speaks about his wife, and some of the dialogue choices shocked me as they seemed contrasting with how Björn had been portrayed up until that point. You really want a book like this to be centred around someone you can route for in bad circumstances, rather than just an awful person killing awful people. The balance of this seemed a little off kilter in places.
Overall, Murder Mindfully is a really fun read and a brilliant premise - next time you turn to murder, makes sure to centre yourself and practice mindfulness! Thank you to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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