Sigrid Odegard, a Norwegian Chief Inspector, travels to the United States to search for her missing brother. Her brother may or may not be responsible for the death of his girlfriend, an African American professor at a small college in upstate New York. In any case he is on the lam and to find him Sigrid partners with the local sheriff, Irv Wylie. The two aren’t buddies so much as friendly adversaries who in between police procedures debate American culture. Where is the line between justice and politics? Are America’s fraught interactions with respect to race insurmountable? Is the American commitment to rugged individualism a precedent for loneliness and mistrust or rather a liberating escape from conformity and groupthink?
While the search for Sigrid’s brother keeps the pages turning, it is Sigrid’s European perspective that animates the tale, and in the process, makes the strongest case possible for the benefits of travel to foreign lands. When navigating a foreign culture–as Sigrid does here–it is inevitable to ask why foreigners do what they do. Then, if the traveler is thinking, she or he asks, “No, wait, why do we do things the way we do?”