Gunnar Staalesen and Kati Hiekkapelto - author event

 Last night Derby Waterstones played host to two Nordic Noir authors - Gunnar Staalesen from Norway and Kati Hiekkapelto from Finland - stopping off as part of a round Britain tour which today takes them north to the Bloody Scotland festival in Stirling. The event was chaired by Derbyshire author Sarah Ward, one of the judges for the Petrona award for best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the year, for which Hiekkapelto's debut novel The Hummingbird was short-listed this year.
As is fairly usual the event opened with the authors reading from their respective novels, but in what is for them a foreign language! An important aspect of Scandinavian crime writing is the sense of place, and both authors chose extracts which emphasised this. Kati Hiekkapelto's novels are set in northern Finland and The Defenceless takes place in spring - not the mild season filled with new growth that we expect but one of ice and snow underfoot, and temperatures still below zero! She read a section which captured the exhilaration felt by her protagonist, detective Anna Fekete, while skiing across a wide expense of frozen sea - an environment that seems totally alien to me! Gunnar Staalesen's extract seemed set in a more familiar place; in We Shall Inherit The Wind, private eye Varg Veum is on a trail which leads him to the scattered islands off Norway's west coast, a place which sounds and looks (if Google streetview is to be believed) very like the places I love in Scotland's Hebrides.
Since the days of Sjowall and Wahloo, Scandinavian crime-writing has explored moral and topical issues alongside the whodunnit aspect, and the two novel under discussion are no exceptions - We Shall Inherit The Wind is set against the controversies surrounding wind farms, while The Defenceless draws on Hiekkapelto's experiences among refugees and assylum seekers.
Sarah Ward proved to be a very able chair to the proceedings and by the time she threw the discussion open to the audience I found she'd asked every question I would have done (but probably more succinctly!)

I was a little disappointed that more of Derby's readers hadn't turned out. It's lovely to have events such as this on the doorstep but they need the support of more than half a dozen enthusiasts. On the other hand, this gave me chance to have a chat after the event with publisher Karen Sullivan of Orenda Books and translator Don Bartlett, the sort of opportunity that can be lost in a crowded room.

You can find out more about both authors and their books on Orenda Book's web site

The Defenceless by Kati Hiekkapelto

review by Maryom

Sammy is living rough on the streets in northern Finland after his asylum application was turned down. It's not easy, particularly during the long cold winter, but back in Pakistan he believes he faces death due to his beliefs so he's hiding out, living very much hand to mouth and turning to drugs to help get him through the days. Dropping by his friend/supplier's flat, he finds himself dragged further into trouble .... but oddly it's trouble that could lead to a positive outcome for him....

 When an old man is hit by a car late at night, it's at first assumed to be just another traffic accident, but Senior Constable Anna Fekete isn't so sure. Starting with the car driver's claim that the man was already lying in the road, things don't quite add up - and the more facts the police uncover, the less things make sense. Meanwhile her colleague Esko is trying to prevent the spread to Finland of a notoriously violent street gang, The Black Cobras...and somehow through the shady world of drug dealers and illegal immigration the two investigations seem linked.

I'll start with the important bit - I loved this! It's more than just a crime novel, but examines the issues that might lead to the crimes - why people might turn to crime or drugs or why people might be driven to leave their native country and seek asylum elsewhere - without for a minute letting up on the riveting story-telling.

There was something about it that made it feel, to me at least, more like real-life than a lot of crime novels do. It has a wonderful twisty plot with a multitude of threads running round each other, and even the smallest detail comes back as an important part of the investigation. There's the atmospheric setting of Finland in 'Spring' with temperatures still well below zero, deep snow still lying on the ground and the sea frozen enough to ski on! The characters are real fully-fleshed out people - from Sammy trying to dodge deportation to Esko with his offensive in-grained racist attitude. Anna herself was once a refugee, from Hungarian-speaking Serbia, and although she's lived in Finland most of her life she still feels a certain level of displacement, and of not quite belonging to either her old home or her new one.
This is the second of the Anna Fekete series but I had no trouble jumping in and catching up with her story so far, though I don't think too much about the previous story The Hummingbird has been given away. Kati Hiekkapelto might just be my new favourite Nordic Noir writer - I'm certainly looking forward to reading more by her.




translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

 Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Orenda Books
Genre - Adult,crime, nordic noir, police procedural

Snow Blind by Ragnar Jonasson

review by Maryom

Ari Thor Arason is expecting his first posting as a police officer to be a quiet one. In the far north of Iceland, Siglufjordur is an isolated place where folk still leave their doors unlocked and nothing exciting ever happens. Well, that is until now.....
As winter settles over the town, with snow piling up to the windows and avalanches blocking the only road out, the local amateur dramatic society are preparing for opening night when tragedy strikes. Their chairman, elderly renowned novelist Hrolfur, is found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the theatre. He could merely have been drunk and slipped, but Ari Thor isn't convinced. Then the girlfriend of one of the actors is found lying in the snow outside her house, half-naked, stabbed and unconscious. As Ari Thor digs deeper into the lives of this quiet, respectable-seeming community, he realises appearances can be deceptive ....and that he doesn't know who he can trust.
 Siglufjordur is a thriller writer's dream location - a tight-knit community, encircled by mountains, almost round-the-clock darkness in midwinter, cut off from the rest of the country by the harsh weather; it all adds to the brooding menace of having a killer at large! Ari Thor, as a new-comer to the area, and encountering it first at its darkest, feels overpowered by it all. He's disoriented too at a personal level; his girlfriend Kristin refused to leave Reykjavik and accompany him North, but in Siglufjordur he meets and finds himself attracted to, Ugla, a young woman, not long living in the area and, like him, still somewhat friendless there.
The story alternates between events unfolding 'now' and a burglary occurring at some unspecified point of time, and it's only at the end that the two threads connect but bear with it, because they DO join up. I wonder if the ending may have some readers feeling unsettled. It certainly isn't a totally cut and dried finish but feels more realistic for it.
Snowblind is the first of a series, so maybe a certain level of background set up was necessary but I felt there was just a little too much lead-in - showing how not just Ari Thor but others too had ended up living in this remote place - before I actually reached the murder. By the end, though, the characters had developed into people whose lives I wanted to know more about ....so now I'm anxiously waiting for Book 2!

translated from Icelandic by Quentin Bates
 Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Orenda Books
Genre - Adult,crime, nordic noir,

The Dangerous Game by Mari Jungstedt

 review by Maryom

Jenny Levin has had a meteoric rise from gangly schoolgirl to super-model. Now she's coming back to her 'home' island of Gotland for a photo shoot at a hotel on the remote Furillen peninsula, with her lover, top fashion photographer Markus Sandberg. All their plans for these few days go awry when Markus is savagely attacked, and left for dead. The attack seems to be random and motiveless but further attacks and threats lead Detective Anders Knutas to the conclusion that someone is targeting members of the fashion industry...but who? and why?


Jumping in part way through a series is never the best way to get acquainted with characters - and The Dangerous Game is the eighth outing for Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas and his colleague Karin Jacobsson, so I had a lot of catching up to do on their private and professional life! Due to this, the story seemed very slow to start but persevering through the opening chapters I found the story starting to grab me.
I also worried at first that the author was a little over-awed by the glamour of the fashion industry but, reading on, this turned out to not be the case. It's seen primarily through Jenny's eyes and she, flying high at the start of her career, still sees only this intoxicating side of the fashion industry, but her position as a highly desirable, sought-after model is contrasted starkly with that of Agnes, whose career abruptly ended when her desire to stay thin led to anorexia.This I thought gave a nice balance and introduced the dangers of obsessing over appearance without preaching.

Unfortunately though, as the story evolved the list of possible suspects grew smaller and, as the reader, I knew things the detectives didn't, which made it easier for me to pinpoint the villain - even the final twist came as no big surprise. Overall I didn't find it as dark as some Nordic Noir thrillers, but more of a comparatively cosy Midsomer Murders style whodunnit.

Maryom's review - 3.5 stars

Publisher - Doubleday

Genre- adult crime Nordic Noir

Dead Souls by Elsebeth Egholm

 review by Maryom

On a routine job, clearing war-time explosives from Danish shipping lanes, diver Kir Røjel discovers a box of human bones. At first she and her fellow divers assume it to be a teaching aid, but the contents turn out to be a lot less innocuous - the victim was garrotted, probably in reprisals at the end of WW2.
Later in the year, at All Hallow's Eve, ex-convict Peter Boutrup finds himself unwillingly dragged into a murder enquiry again - a young nun goes missing only to be found dead in her convent's moat, and as Peter was the last person to see her alive, the police are obviously suspicious of him. The nun though has also been garrotted which causes Detective Mark Bille Hansen to believe the two deaths are linked, despite the 60 years between them.
And as if all this isn't enough trouble for Peter to be in, his past is still stalking him. He's contacted by the mother of his deceased friend My, asking for his help in tracing her son who's disappeared, he's being manipulated by someone he felt he could trust and the local drug-dealing biker-gang still feel they have a score to settle with him. Life's never as peaceful as he would like.

Elsebeth Egholm's latest thriller takes the reader back to the countryside and characters familiar from Three Dog Night  It's a complex, convoluted plot weaving several strands together as Peter Boutrup,  Kir Røjel and Mark Bille Hansen find themselves brought together again in the search for a killer, with each of them approaching the target from a different direction and seeing part of the puzzle but not the wider picture. How after all can a murder committed in the 1940s be related to the activities of present day animal activists or the special talent of which one strange family is so proud? It's all excellently done, the different threads moving forward simultaneously and leading the reader (and the police investigators) to suspect first one person, then another.

Be warned - this is Nordic Noir so it is at times rather gruesome, and not for the easily disturbed. I loved it but for me the unravelling of the mystery, and the following of obscure clues leading to the perpetrator always over-rides any squeamishness on my part.

It's probably not necessary to have read the first book of this series, but I did find it helpful having already been introduced to the main characters and their relationship to each other because the story hits the ground running with murder victims piling up almost from the first page.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - Adult thriller, Nordic Noir

Three Dog Night by Elsebeth Egholm

review by Maryom

Ex-convict Peter Boutrup wants to move on, forget the past and live a quiet respectable life - but things are rarely that easy, are they? First an old friend turns up talking about a lost treasure, then while out walking his dog Peter finds another old acquaintance  dead at the bottom of cliffs - and his reclusive neighbour Felix seems to know more about this than she's telling. At the same time, a local girl has gone missing and a body, which may or may not be hers, turned up in the harbour.  Can all these things be related? It looks like Peter's dreams of a rural idyll are going to be on hold for a while.

Three Dog Night is a complex thriller set against the backdrop of Denmark's coldest winter. The story moves from two directions - that of Peter and his neighbour Felix, and that of the police department who are investigating matters from a totally different angle. As the two begin to merge things turn bloody and brutal. It's a compelling read that goes beyond the mere working out of whodunnit and why, to create a whole cast of characters, each with their own secrets and foibles.
 There's such an array of wonderfully drawn characters that it's difficult to know where to start; Peter himself with his dreadful children's home upbringing and desire to leave his past behind; widowed amnesiac Felix, mourning the death of her husband and daughter; local police chief Mark Bille Hansen, down-sizing his career due to health issues and his former lover from Copenhagen, now his superior, and a potential new one, Kir, the local girl and army diving specialist. It feels  not so much like reading a book as slipping into a new town and playing 'fly on the wall'.
This is the first in a series featuring Peter Boutrup and I don't think we've heard all there is to know about Peter's time in prison or the reason he was there in the first place, and I expect the other characters will be back too.

It's the sort of thing we all love from Danish TV thrillers, but in a book!

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - Adult thriller, Nordic Noir

Buy Three Dog Night from Amazon

Some Kind Of Peace by Camilla Grebe and Asa Traff

review by Maryom

Siri Bergman is a psychotherapist. Good at helping others out with their problems and fears, she refuses to acknowledge her own. Since her husband's death in a diving accident, she's continued to live in their remote seaside cottage, pretending nothing has changed but at night the only way she can sleep is to leave all the lights blazing. Somewhere out there, she feels someone is watching her - and soon her fears start to come true. At first the lights are switched off and her emergency torch disappears - irritating things, suspicious things but in themselves relatively harmless. Then the dead body of one of her patients is found floating in the bay by the cottage. At first the police dismiss it as suicide but events soon lead them, and Siri, to believe that things have taken a more dangerous turn.

Some Kind Of Peace is an excellent thriller from a pair of Swedish writers new to me. It 's the sort of story that starts calmly but with each new event the tension mounts. If you've ever imagined eyes watching you in the dark, or footsteps following you down the street, you're in for a really scary read - even without those fears you'll be gripped! There are snippets interspersed with the action to allow the reader inside the stalker's head - and maybe help identify him/her. I think that's the only negative comment I have to make - I guessed whodunnit!  While Siri was starting to think twice about her work colleagues, friends and patients, to wonder if one of them might be behind the dreadful things happening to those around her, I'd made my mind up about who the stalker was. I don't really think it lessened my enjoyment of the story though, just made me feel smug when I was proved right!
One aspect I really liked was the 'foreign', Swedish feel of the setting. A lot of Scandinavian Noir is gripping and gritty but, apart from excessive cold or a glimpse of midnight sun, could be taking place anywhere. From the opening scene, Some Kind of Peace unfolds against a backdrop of Swedish sights - from bustling Stockholm to Siri's coastal cottage, from the continuous light of summer to almost perpetual dark of winter I felt I was really there.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars

Publisher - Simon & Schuster

Genre - crime, adult fiction, Nordic Noir


Buy Some Kind of Peace from Amazon

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul

Who Did It?
 review by Maryom

One quiet morning Halland leaves his house, walks across the square and is killed by a shot from a hunting rifle. Is it an accident? Someone taking a pot shot at a deer? Or was someone deliberately out to kill him?

This novella is a murder mystery with a difference - not a 'whodunnit' but an exploration of bereavement. Although there is a detective trying to puzzle things out, events unfold not from his perspective but from that of Halland's partner Bess. Like the fjord that ripples in constantly changing blues and greens, the simple telling of her story hides uncharted depths. So many small everyday items and events remind her of Halland and their life together, that she feels she's living in perpetual flashbacks. The reader learns about her estranged daughter, rarely seen in the past 10 years, her unsympathetic mother, the ex-husband who after all these years still feels hopeful that they can get back together again. And Halland's little personal and financial secrets all come tumbling out of the closet too....

At one point Bess comments that her mother had the ability to repeat words in a way that completely changed their meaning - and that's how I felt at times as I read, that so many of the phrases and sentences could be interpreted more than one way. I'm not sure if this was in part down to translation - although smooth and readable I wondered if some nuances might have been lost - or if it was deliberate. I'd love to read this with a like-minded group to be able to bounce ideas around and hear their conclusions. This is in a way an interim review - I want to re-read The Murder of Halland in the light of things disclosed later in the book to see if I can to a firm conclusion.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Peirene Press
Genre - Adult Literary Fiction

 Buy The Murder of Halland from Amazon or check out Peirene's website for offers and subscription deals.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Review by Maryom

Having lost an expensive libel case, Mikael Blomkvist finds himself faced with a huge damages payment and discredited as a journalist. Hoping to be given information to fight his case, he takes a job with Henrik Vanger, head of huge family firm Vanger Corporation - ostensibly to write a family history but actually to investigate the disappearance or death of Vanger's great-niece back in the 60s. He's aided in his investigation by Lisbeth Salander - anorexic tattooed security specialist and computer hacker extraordinaire. Together they uncover a gruesome series of murders, hidden in the idyllic setting of Vanger's estate.

When this book was first published I was offered a review copy from somewhere - and turned it down! For years I've wondered what I missed out on and if it was possible for it to live up to its hype so when I saw a copy at the library ...
It's always difficult reading a book that's had such a lot of publicity, rave reviews and film adaptations - expectations are often raised far too high. So how did The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fare? Actually, it didn't do too badly. The story line was intriguing with a variety of twists and turns. It's not perfect - I felt the setting up chapters stretched on for too long, I found it difficult to care very much about the characters and the I guessed some of the key plot twists in advance. All in all though an interesting read.

Would I read the rest of the trilogy? Probably not if I had to go out of my way to find them; if for some reason they crossed my path - in front of me on a library or holiday cottage shelf - then I possibly would.

Maryom's review - 3.5 stars 
Publisher - Maclehose Press/Quercus Books
Genre -  adult crime fiction

 Buy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium Trilogy Book 1) from Amazon

Another Time, Another Life by Leif GW Persson

Review by Maryom

Another Time, Another Life is an epic crime thriller, spanning 25 years.
 It opens in 1975 with 6 young Germans taking hostage the staff of their embassy in Stockholm, continues in 1989 with the murder of a rather obnoxious civil servant and concludes in 1999, as the links at last fall into place.

It took me a while to get hooked by this story. The Siege-intro section isn't long and the story then cuts to a seemingly unrelated crime. I also had problems with the translation - it felt at times too literal, and particularly at the beginning I kept pulling up short on awkward words. Once I'd got into the plot, I think I overlooked them more.
 Persson certainly manages to create characters you aren't likely to forget - though for the wrong reasons. The detective in charge of the 80s murder case is one of the most blinkered, misogynistic, homophobic characters ever! Fortunately there are more reasonable policemen around to limit his effect and by the 90s there are capable policewomen to solve the case he couldn't!
Something about it reminded me of Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - possibly the way a lot of the detection was done by trawling through police records rather than hauling in a suspect and forcing a confession.
Despite the slow start, Another Time, Another Life is an engrossing, twist and turn mystery  - if only they'd investigated my prime suspect for the 80s murder, they'd have cleared things up much quicker!

Maryom's review - 4 stars

Publisher - Doubleday
Genre - crime, thriller, adult

Buy Another Time, Another Life from Amazon

The Drowning by Camilla Lackberg

You Can't Outrun the Past
Review by Maryom
One morning, walking to a colleague's house, Magnus Kjellner disappears. Three months further on and the police seem to have no clues - until his body is found frozen beneath the ice.

Meanwhile, his friend Christian Thydell is on the brink of realising his dream - his first novel is about to be published to great acclaim but his happiness is marred by a series of threatening letters he's been receiving. The 'real-time' story is interspersed with flashbacks which gradually reveal the dreadful secret which links these boyhood friends. No one seems at all prepared to help the police who feel increasingly helpless at the rising number of deaths.

This is the first novel I've read by Camilla Lackberg and I've managed to jump in part way through a series revolving around police officer Patrik Hedström and his wife, crime writer, Erica Falck - so there was obviously a lot of their back story that I was missing. This doesn't really detract from the plot but I'd now like to go backwards and read their story from the beginning.

It's very readable with a well thought out plot but doesn't have the nail-biting tension of some crime thrillers.

Overall, there's more of an air of Midsomer Murders or Miss Marple rather than hard gritty crime thriller about The Drowning. The police seem to stumble around aimlessly as events unfold and eventually happen upon the culprit by accident rather than design. The 'real' detective is Erica. In a friendly, gossipy way reminiscent of Miss Marple, she chats to people and teases out the secrets they wouldn't reveal to her policeman husband, Patrik.

An interesting new 'find' in Scandi-crime reading and an author I'll be reading more from.

This counts towards one of my challenges for this year as it was sitting on my TBR pile. I won it somewhere on the web, but can't remember where or when - please shout out if it was on your blog.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Harper Collins
Genre - adult, crime

Buy The Drowning from Amazon

Vanished by Liza Marklund

How To Disappear
review by Maryom

A woman is on the run from a killer after two men are shot dead in the container port of Frihamnen near Stockholm. When she contacts the Evening Post newspaper offices, she is put through to copy-editor Annika Bengtzon, who in turn puts her in contact with The Paradise Foundation - an organisation that claims it can make people disappear without trace - offering a lifeline to battered wives or criminals eager to escape their past. Annika's further enquiries into the Foundation start to leave her wondering if it is as altruistic as it first appeared and if referring anyone to them was such a good move. Investigating both the dockside killing and Paradise's credentials leads Annika along a convoluted, dangerous trail and to an encounter that will shape her life.

I read my first Liza Marklund thriller, The Bomber, just before Christmas and was curious to see how Vanished would compare. Some crime/thriller series fall into a repetitive mould with the same-old characters going through the same-old motions time and again. Happily, Marklund has avoided that trap. Vanished is set at an earlier point in time than The Bomber. Annika Bengtzon is down on her luck at this point in her life - leading an almost solitary existence in her crumbling dilapidated flat, working odd hours at the Evening Post, troubled by her family relationships. All in all things are not going well for her. There are hints at her backstory - enough to fill in the gaps but not so much that I wouldn't want to read about it. I was fascinated to see how the Annika Bengtzon character had developed over the time between Vanished and The Bomber. Here she is younger, less confident of herself in both personal and work relationships, but still recognisable as the more mature person she will become. She comes over as a real, living, breathing faults-and-all person and through her Marklund examines issues that affect many lives- difficulties with family, care of the elderly, uncaring work colleagues.
It is, of course, mainly a thriller. Her journalistic instincts for a good story lead Annika into situations that will have you biting your fingernails and reading rapidly to get her out of the fix. Most definitely a book that falls into the 'stay-up-late to find out how it ends' category.

Vanished is published next month - but meanwhile I've seen other Annika Bengtzon thrillers on sale in my local supermarket...

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Corgi/Transworld
Genre - thriller

Buy Vanished from Amazon

The Bomber by Liza Marklund

The second in our seasonal series of reviews, The Bomber is set in the week running up to Christmas.


All she wants for Christmas....
review by Maryom

Annika Bengtzon is the newly appointed head of the crime-desk at Stockholm's Evening Post newspaper, stressed out from all sides - pressure from deadlines, hassle from her male colleagues and the everyday chores of family life. Just when she's looking for a quiet week on the run up to Christmas a major story breaks as a massive bomb goes off at the Olympic Stadium, leaving pieces of the victim scattered everywhere. Annika is determined to be first with any news about the killing but her enquiries soon lead her too close to the bomber.

The Bomber is my first Liza Marklund novel and one I thoroughly enjoyed. It's an interesting slant to have the investigation of a murder seen from a journalistic angle - not with Annika playing a Miss Marple type amateur sleuth but merely going about her job and uncovering the victim's private life hidden behind a public façade. There's a lot of well-captured office atmosphere with back-biting and griping from co-workers who wanted her job but the focus is, of course, on who is responsible for the bombing and what is their motivation.
An excellent whodunnit with a totally gripping ending - even though I thought I knew how it would resolve itself.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Corgi/Transworld
Genre - thriller

Buy The Bomber from Amazon

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Northern Witchcraft
review by Maryom

Harald Guntlieb is a wealthy German student continuing his research into European witch trials in Reykjavik. That is, until his horribly mutilated corpse is discovered propped in a cupboard at the university. The police quickly arrest his drug-dealer friend Hugi but his family are not convinced the killer has been found and engage Icelandic lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir to re-examine the case alongside their company's representative ex-policeman Matthew Reich.
It soon appears that Harald's interest in witchcraft was not solely academic and Thora and Matthew are led on an increasingly grisly trail attempting to discover the events leading to Harald's death.

Another excellent Scandi-crime discovery, full of convolutions and saving the best twists and turns for the end - although as I flicked through before writing this review, I realised that clues for the ending had been there all along but not quite spotted by me!

In the best tradition of fictional detectives, Thora has her own problems at home - mainly centred on her son Gylfi. Last Rituals is the first of a series and I'll be interested to see how he copes with future events and how the relationship between Thora and Matthew develops.

I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more of an Icelandic feel to the story - and, no, I can't quite put my finger on what I mean by that, other than to say that although Thora and Matthew's investigation takes them to various places outside of Reykjavik - such as the Museum of Witchcraft and Sorcery at Holmavik and caves settled by Irish monks - I didn't get a feel for the landscape or atmosphere. Still, this novel is meant to be a crime thriller, not a travel guide!


Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Hodder
Genre - adult, crime/thriller,


Buy Last Rituals from Amazon

Death Sentence by Mikkel Birkegaard

Life Imitating Art
review by Maryom

Frank Føns is an author of brutal thrillers - the more twisted and perverse his plots, the more his public loves him. Safely confined to the printed page, how can even the most violent death harm anyone? They aren't so appealing though when someone begins to copy his fictional murders in real life. Gradually Føns takes on the role of detective to track down the copycat killer before his world collapses completely.

It's often said but this really was a compelling, page turning read. Presented as notes written by Frank Føns himself, the unfolding drama is interspersed with flashbacks of his life with which Birkegaard creates a rounded, if warped, personality for him. As the back story unfolds, the reader shares in his struggle for success as a writer, the strains placed on his relationships, the loss of his family. But what really holds the reader's attention is the continuing working out of Føns' plots in real life. Who is copying Føns' books and why? Can he/she be stopped? Sometimes suspecting one person, then another, I was kept guessing to the end.
Warning - this is at times very violent. I really found the final section TOO disturbing - and resorted to skim-reading. I know this is cheating a little but it was really too realistic and unnerving for my comfort. Overall though, the violence was outweighed by story-line.

Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Transworld Books
Genre - Adult Thriller