The house-of-cards structure, piling one disaster atop another, lacks the remorseless logic of the best Nordic procedurals....
Sarenbrant’s first English translation introduces to crime-ridden Scandinavia a Swedish police detective whose third recorded case strikes uncomfortably close to home.
Ordinarily, Emma Sköld’s pregnancy would be the biggest news in her life. But even though she and Kristoffer, her realtor lover, are overjoyed, their pleasure is overshadowed by a new development in the already grim life of Cornelia Göransson, a friend of Emma’s older sister, personal trainer Josefin Eriksson. Just when Cornelia thought the sale of the home she shared with Hans Göransson, the much older husband who dazzled her many years ago with the wealth from his commercial real estate agency, would get her safely away from his mental and physical abuse, Hans comes back to haunt her in the most graphic possible way: by turning up dead the morning after realtor Helena Sjöblom stages her second open house. Cornelia hustles their developmentally delayed 6-year-old, Astrid, away from the scene and over to Josefin’s house, little aware that she’ll need to make more urgent demands on Josefin’s friendship when she’s arrested for murder and must ask Josefin to take Astrid indefinitely. Emma and the rest of Stockholm County’s Violent Crime Detective Unit, unable to uncover any evidence, turn a cold ear on Cornelia’s tales of decades of unreported abuse, and the only remedy for her plight seems to be another dose of homicide while she’s still in police custody. But this latest outrage brings the case even closer to Emma’s own hearth and home.
The house-of-cards structure, piling one disaster atop another, lacks the remorseless logic of the best Nordic procedurals. There’s no denying, though, that the climactic revelation is a shocker.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-91-7547-197-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Stockholm Text
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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