Soon after Professor Nina Wisloff rashly suggests literary scholars would make better detectives than the police she gets a chance to prove it. The tenant of her late mother-in-law’s house in Bergen, Norway, a former child prodigy on the violin, disappears and Nina, patronised by her doctor husband and ignored by her pushy, pregnant daughter, is determined to prove foul play. The works of Sigmund Freud, Bruno Bettelheim and Charles Perrault are all cited in The Seven Doors — the title refers to Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle about the infamous wife-killer – but life is not a fairytale and Nina is not as skilled as she thinks she is in reading between the lines.
