This thriller follows journalist Heloise Kaldan as she begins to receive a series of letters allegedly written by wanted murder, Anna Kiel. Wanted for a murder of a lawyer 3 years prior, Anna is suspected to have fled Denmark and hasn't been able to be found. Heloise is, at first, skeptical that the letters are from Anna, but she investigates nonetheless and, after a series of escalating events, she finds herself working alongside homicide detective Erik Schafer. The two work together to figure out if the letters are truly from Anna and if so, why has she decided to come out of hiding now and why did she choose to write to Heloise. The answers to both questions might only be found if Heloise reveals the darkest parts of her own past.
TW/CW: child abuse, rape, suicide
I really enjoyed this story and even though I found it to be a pretty standard Nordic police procedural, I found the investigation plot and the reveals to be really engaging. This book gets really dark in the last 25% and I wasn't expecting it to go where it went. I personally love police procedural stories, especially Nordic Noir. This story is set in Copenhagen, Denmark and I think it being set in a more urban setting instead of out in some small town in the frozen countryside (like a lot of Nordic Noir stories seem to be) could make this a more enjoyable read for someone who isn't super into that subgenre. This is the first book in a series and I hope the rest of the series gets translated into English as well because I'd love to continue to follow Heloise.
The character work in this book I thought was very well done. We get two main POVs - Heloise and Schafer - as well as 2 additional POVs whose identities we don't know right away. We also meet a number of different side characters such as Heloise's coworkers, her best friend, and Schafer's partner on the police force. I really enjoyed that Heloise wasn't a complete loner-workaholic like a lot of journalists in these police thrillers tend to be. Through these relationships with these secondary characters, it really felt like we would pull back layer after layer of Heloise and her past. With Schafer as well, we got a bit of his frustrations with the legal system and how he was so sure that one character was involved in some crimes but just couldn't find any evidence of it. Heloise is our main character but I would have liked to see Schafer on page more often and have his character a little more fully developed. We get some scenes with him and his wife and I would have liked to have seen more of that side of him. Since this is the first book in a series, maybe future books will explore his background more. I thought the reveals at the end were really interesting, especially when it came to why Heloise was chosen to receive these letters. I think the reveal did a nice job of walking the line between revealing more character backstory while also showing how far Heloise has come from those events in her past.
I also enjoyed the investigation thread and how all the pieces came together. The story really starts out as more of a mystery where Heloise is trying to figure out if these letters are actually from Anna and if there's a chance that Anna was innocent but it pretty quickly got into thriller territory with the events and threats to Heloise escalating quickly. Despite this being the first book in a series, all the investigation plot lines were tied up by the end of the book and it seems like the other two books in the series follow other cases that don't sound like they're connected to this case. As I mentioned above, the subject matter of the ending reveal is pretty dark which I wasn't expecting from the tone of the rest of the book. The story, generally, doesn't read as a super gritty or dark read so the subject matter at the end was a bit of a surprise. I don't know if there's an actual word for this, but this investigation does what I love best in these mystery/thrillers were something or someone that was discounted from the investigation earlier ends up being important. I just really love it when the reader knows we can't forget about X,Y, or Z just because the investigation says that lead is a dead end. I did feel the ending glossed over some aspects that I would have liked to see on page but instead we just get a summary of what happened. I understand that, from a narrative and pacing perspective, we can't dwell too long on the ending after the climax had already been reached but I was really interested in seeing how the ending panned out for everyone. I really enjoyed how the author was a little bit hands off at the end where she wasn't going to spell everything out for the reader and instead just gave us a scene that shows us X character doing Y so the reader knows they were connected all along, but we're left on our own to fill in the finer details.
My main gripe with the story is that I found some details to be ultimately unimportant and I was frustrated by this. Now, I'm not talking about red herrings or leads that the detective chases down only for them to be dead ends. I'm talking about plot points where A is mentioned and the narrative is structured in such a way as to make the reader think that A is going to be really important. A is somehow going to be the key to unlocking the mystery or A is going to become a big threat to our beloved characters. But then, by the end, none of those things came true and in fact A was basically just mentioned once as a detail and never really explored further. Obviously, I know that not every little detail in a story will be important to the overall plot - sometimes these details are just ways for the author to enrich the overall world they're building. However, in this case there were 2 details that seemed they were going to be much more important overall. I can't go into detail to the points because they would be spoilers, but they did make me pause at the end and think "wait, so was A and B just not important?" And I wouldn't call these plot hole necessarily and maybe other readers won't feel strongly about being led on by those details but I really thought both of those points were going to play a much bigger role overall when instead they were basically shoved under the rug.
As a final note, there were two small descriptions that made me take pause and since this is a translation from Danish to English, I'm not sure if these parts just didn't translate over well or if the wording was a deliberate choice (of course, since this is an ARC the final book may change these, but I wanted to mention them anyway). The first is a description of Schafer's wife who is described as having 'jet-black' skin and the second is a character in a wheelchair who someone comments 'doesn't look disabled' because he's sitting up tall and straight in a picture. In both of these instances, the narrative moved quickly onto the next point so neither point was really well explored and it could be easy to miss them if you're reading quickly. I'm not dark skinned or disabled so I can't speak to how those passages would come across to members of those communities but I did want to mention them because they did stick out as I was reading. The translation, overall, I thought was really well done and I didn't have many places that I paused over the actual phrasing or structure of the narrative. There were some odd pop culture references to celebrities and TV shows which I think might not age very well. The original story was written in 2017 and in Danish and I would be interested to know if these pop culture references were the same in the original story or if they were changed for the English version.
Overall, I really enjoyed this story and found the characters and investigation to be well developed. There were a few parts that seemed like they should have played a bigger part in the overall story and thus slowed down the pacing a bit.
Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC in exchange for review
Expected publication date is October 12, 2021.
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