Choice Nordic noir featuring a pressure-cooker scenario, gripping action, and nerve-wracking psychological tension.
A Danish detective is blackmailed into exacting vigilante justice in Krefeld’s thriller.
Inspector Cecilie Mars is a Copenhagen police detective with impressive sleuthing instincts, a barren personal life, an intermittent drug habit, and nightmares of past trauma. One night, as she’s tailing a rape suspect, she sees his car crash, struggles with him after he attacks her, and improperly flees the scene; after he turns up dead, Cecilie receives a video of the encounter edited to appear that she killed him. “Lazarus,” the anonymous maker of the video, threatens to publicize it unless she agrees to carry out his agenda to kill rapists and murderers who got off with light sentences courtesy of Denmark’s lax justice system (and who are presumably plotting new crimes). Her involvement grows deeper and bloodier with each assignment until Lazarus tasks her with killing her own rapist, a man who assaulted her when she was 17 and has now kidnapped a new victim. This tortuous situation ties Cecilie up in moral knots: The monsters Lazarus has her hunting must be stopped, yet she’s also committing serious offenses—and probably being set up by Lazarus to be framed for murder. In Giles’ deft English translation, Krefeld’s tale is an intricate police procedural, taut with intrigue that explodes into terrifying violence, and a gritty depiction of a far-from-quaint Copenhagen characterized by cynical legal bureaucrats, grim concrete high-rises, and menacing street gangs. The prose is energetic and colorful, even Wagnerian at times—“You shall be my thrall in Valhalla!” thunders one psycho as he prepares to sacrifice a woman to Odin—but equally adept at evoking the queasy, claustrophobic feeling of victimization (revisiting her attack, Cecilie bleakly recalls “[t]he smell of urine emanating from him, mixing with the stench of the dumpsters. His limpness. The many slaps to her face that he delivered, slowly making him hard and ready.”) The result is an engrossing page-turner as Cecilie snakes her way through a seemingly inescapable maze.
Choice Nordic noir featuring a pressure-cooker scenario, gripping action, and nerve-wracking psychological tension.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1039424975
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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