HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £ 16. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Description
Expert on body language and memory, and consultant to the Oslo
Police, psychologist Kari Voss sleepwalks through her days, and, by
night, continues the devastating search for her young son, who
disappeared on his birthday, seven years earlier.
Still grieving for her dead husband, and trying to pull together the
pieces of her life, she is thrust into a shocking local investigation,
when two teenage girls are violently murdered in a family summer
home in the nearby village of Son.
When a friend of the victims is charged with the barbaric killings, it
seems the case is closed, but Kari is not convinced. Using her skills
and working on instinct, she conducts her own enquiries, leading
her to multiple suspects, including people who knew the dead girls
well…
With the help of Chief Constable Ramona Norum, she discovers
that no one – including the victims – are what they seem. And that
there is a dark secret at the heart of Son village that could have
implications not just for her own son’s disappearance, but Kari’s
own life, too…
My Review
Thanks to the team at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of this novel for the blog tour.
I have read previous books by both of the authors and was expecting a complex mystery, and oh my! did I get it!?
Kari Voss is a woman devastated first by the loss of her husband in a house fire and then by the disappearance of her seven-year-old son. Nine years later, her son’s former best friends are in trouble, or dead. Kari is determined to help the survivor of the quartet, although everyone else thinks he’s a monster.
Sifting through the information, and using her skills as a psychologist who specialises in memory and body language, Kari discovers more secrets than she expected and slowly uncovers the truth. And, to end the novel the reader discovers something that Kari doesn’t know, leaving us with a mystery to be going on with.
Which I’m not going to tell you because spoilers. But also, it is hinted at throughout the novel. I thought it when I read a certain part, and dismissed it as unlikely. Do not dismiss anything!
Kari’s development as a character is interesting; the case is close to home and brings up her own trauma, resulting in blackouts and incautious behaviour. When she starts to follow her instincts and face her pain, she starts a slow recovery from the relapse. Her relapse and recovery were sensitively portrayed, showing a dedication to accuracy that I admire in the writers.
The swirl of characters around Kari was a little hard to follow at times; the parents of the victims and the suspect, as well as their immediate friends and schoolmates, were all apparently wealthy and hiding secrets of their own. Liars, neglectful parents, cheaters, overindulgent parents…protecting their reputations ahead of justice. It took me a while to work out who was who but it all made sense in the end. It might have been a function of Kari’s own increasing confusion and distance from them.
The only one who felt fully realised was William, one of the victims’ father, who was also Kari’s neighbour and helped search for clues about who killed the girls. They spend a lot of time together, and I think that makes him a more concrete character, because he’s a part of Kari’s world in the way the other parents aren’t.
Kari’s father Hans Christian is also a solid character, while Ramona is more fuzzy, at least for me. I think that’s because we see a lot of events from Kari and Hans Christian’s perspectives, so it’s easier to feel they are concrete. Also, I am pretty certain Johana wrote Kari and Thomas wrote Hans Christian, and they both worked on the story equally. I recognise the way they both write their characters. It’s easy when you’ve read as many of their books as I have to start picking up on patterns, but I am prepared to be wrong.
The false memory experiments referred to in the novel are real, they did happen. The German-Canadian forensic psychologist, Dr Julia Shaw, who, with Sofie Hagen, was the presenter of BBC Sounds podcast Bad People, did her PhD thesis on false memories and the ways police sometimes accidentally create them in suspects. I recognised the reference as soon as I read it, because I enjoyed listening to the podcast. I actually wrote a character based on things I learnt from listening to her podcast, reading one of her books and another book she referenced, for a short story in an anthology several years ago. It’s a fascinating subject.
Another gripping Scandinavian Noir from amazingly talented authors. Recommended.
ABOUT JOHANA GUSTAWSSON & THOMAS ENGER
Known as the Queen of French Noir, Johana Gustawsson is one of France’s most highly regarded, award-winning crime writers, recipient of the prestigious Cultura Ligue de l`Imaginaire Award for her gothic mystery Yule Island. Number-one bestselling books include Block 46, Keeper, Blood Song and her historical thriller, The Bleeding. Johana lives in Sweden with her family.
A former journalist, Thomas Enger is the number-one bestselling author of the Henning Juul series and, with co-author Jørn Lier Horst, the
international bestselling Blix & Ramm series, and one of the biggest proponents of the Nordic Noir genre. He lives in Oslo.
Rights to Johana and Thomas’ books have been sold to a combined fifty countries and, for the first time, two crime writers, from two different
countries, writing in two different languages, have joined forces to create an original series together.
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