Espen Holm
The Blumenfeld Trial

A novel on one of the most intriguing trials in Norwegian history. A Jewish couple were brutally killed and dumped in a lake when they tried to escape the Nazi persecutions and arrests in Oslo in 1942. The killers later admitted the crime, but were found not guilty in the trial after the war. It was argued that they had merely protected a vital escape route for the Norwegian resistance movement by their action. A fascinating novel on rights and wrongs and on how ordinary people navigated according to changing winds and weather during the war and in the years right after.
The novel is based on a true story known as the Feldmann Trial. The trial documents and proofs were denied public access untill the author managed to gain access to the arcives in his research.
The Blumenfeld Trial is at first a thrilling escape story from Norway and Sweden in the war years, then a hunt for the killers and finally an intriguing moral drama when the two are brought for the Court.
Espen Holm was nominated for the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel for his previous thriller King Solomon’s sword (Gyldendal 2012). The Blumenfeld Trial is his third novel.

Espen Holm

Sturlason

Espen Holm works as a storyteller and fiction writer. He was born during the uprising in Berlin in June 1953 and grew up in Oslo.

Holm was educated in Germany. He has spent several years with IBM before he decided to set up his own IT-company. Since then he has also founded a management consulting company and Elixir Publishing. During his varied career he has baked bread, sold computers, designed ads, worked as a programmer, written non-fiction, taught computer science and told corporate stories and trained managers to tell theirs.

He lives with his wife in Kolbotn, just outside Oslo. In winter you will find him running cross-country in the snowy forests with his black Labrador. In summer he spends his time on a small island in the Oslo Fjord where there are no streets, no shops, no electricity. Here he works on his new fiction stories. Espen Holm is deeply inspired by myth and the oral tradition of storytelling.