#Bookvent – Celebrating my top reads of 2017
My sixth bookvent pick is actually book four in a series, but it was the first one I had read. I was soon regretting it. This may well have been my first look at Norwegian fiction, but from the moment I started reading I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I was immediately captured by the sense of sadness which enveloped the book and the main protagonist, but also the intrepid nature of the central characters, people who would not stop until they had found the truth, no matter how dangerous it turned out to be. Book six in my #bookvent countdown is …
What secret would you kill to protect? When Hedda Hellberg fails to return from a retreat in Italy, where she has been grieving for her recently dead father, her husband discovers that his wife’s life is tangled in mystery. Hedda never left Oslo, the retreat has no record of her and, what’s more, she appears to be connected to the death of an old man, gunned down on the first day of the hunting season in the depths of the Swedish forests. Henning Juul becomes involved in the case when his ex-wife joins in the search for the missing woman, and the estranged pair find themselves enmeshed both in the murky secrets of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, and in the painful truths surrounding the death of their own son.
With the loss of his son to deal with, as well as threats to his own life and to that of his ex-wife, Juul is prepared to risk everything to uncover a sinister maze of secrets that ultimately leads to the dark heart of European history.
Taut, chilling and unputdownable, Cursed is the fourth in the internationally renowned series featuring conflicted, disillusioned by always dogged crime reporter Henning Juul, and marks the return of one of Norway’s finest crime writers. FOR FANS OF Stieg Larsson, Gunnar Staalesen, K.O. Dahl, Jorn Lier Horst, Johan Theorin and The Bridge
This book has quite the opening sequence. It left me with so many questions that I found myself being compelled to read onwards, desperate to know quite what the man in the forest had to do with the missing woman. And who would want to kill him? He certainly didn’t seem like a threat to anyone. Once I started I could not stop reading. This book wasn’t frantic in pace and yet there were so many moments of quiet threat that I was still kept on edge. Henning Juul is a character who quickly captured my imagination, and although I wasn’t fully aware of his back story having not read the previous books, I got an overwhelming sense of his sadness, could feel the pain seeping from every page. And the imagery, the picture I got of the landscape, was beautifully captured in the prose. The story itself is a blend of a missing persons investigation and Henning’s quest to find the truth about what happened to his son and changed his life forever. I never once saw the ending coming. I cannot wait for book five to see how Henning will rid himself of his demons, if indeed he can. Simply beautiful writing, cementing my new found love for Scandi or Nordic Noir.
You can read my full review of Cursed right here and you can purchase a copy of the book from the following retailers.
Amazon UK | Amazon US | Kobo | Waterstones
Happy #bookvent reading all
JL
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