A MOTHER'S LOVE

The first case for a newly created unit of the Danish National Police turns out to contain enough murky depths for a whole series.

Louise Rick’s excitement at heading P13, the new traveling division designed to provide expert assistance to local departments working to solve serious crimes, quickly sours when she sees how few colleagues she’s been assigned to take to Tåsinge Island, where handyman Jack Skovby has found innkeeper Dorthe Hyllested beaten to death; how tight a rein Søren Velin, the architect of P13, intends to keep on her inquiries; and how closely she’s expected to work with Eik, the missing persons officer whom she ran out on when he indicated that despite his proposal, he wasn’t ready to commit to marrying her. The most puzzling clue Louise discovers is a bedroom in Dorthe’s Strammelse Inn fitted out for a young boy even though there’s no boy on the premises and nobody knows of any such boy. After she alerts her friend Camilla Lind, a crime reporter for Morgenavisen, about the case, the two women begin investigations that are sometimes parallel, sometimes complementary, sometimes pointedly at odds with each other, offering Blaedel plenty of opportunities for crosscutting and cliffhanger chapter endings. Beneath the mystery of the innkeeper’s murder and the resonant characters on the island who serve as confidants, suspects, and accomplices, they’ll find a sex ring, another murder-suicide, a fatal tangle of family loyalties and betrayals, and a powerfully extended meditation on the complicated relations between love and desire.

A new chapter in the heroine’s career reveals the many flavors and the high costs of a mother’s love.