ODD NUMBERS

Eleven years after she’s sidelined from the Oslo police department by a bullet to the back, retired DI Hanne Wilhelmsen rejoins her old friend Billy T. to root out a particularly virulent cell of terrorists.

Considering how long she’s been in a wheelchair, Hanne (1222, 2012, etc.), who still consults with the police, is suddenly suspiciously popular. Officer Henrik Holme seeks her help in a cold case: the 1996 disappearance of teenager Karina Knoph. Closer to home, Billy T. wants to know why his son Linus has been acting so strangely remote lately. Ever since the bombing of the offices of the National Council of Islam in Norway killed 23 people, Billy T.’s been worried that Linus might have gotten in with the wrong crowd. But although Linus makes no secret of his hatred and contempt for the father who sired him along with five siblings scattered among five different mothers, he assures him so passionately that he’d never have anything to do with Islamists that Billy T. has to believe him. As talking heads on Norwegian TV solemnly weigh in on the problems of immigration and nativism, police discover the corpse of Abdullah Hassan, the best friend of missing suspected bomber Mohammad Awad, poisoned and dismembered, and learn that over 100 pounds of C4 has gone missing from the army’s stockpile. Billy T. works himself into a frenzy over his son; Deputy Chief of Police Håkon Sand goes toe-to-toe with his brazenly unapologetic childhood friend Lt. Col. Gustav Gulliksen over the missing explosives; but it’s young Henrik Holme who’ll carry off the honors for detective work. Pray that his labors, and everyone else’s, are enough to do the job.

A prophetic counterterrorist procedural whose bold central conceit is likely to grow more depressingly plausible with every passing week.