August 20, 2012
In this thrilling follow-up to Kaaberbøl and Friis's 2011 debut, The Boy in the Suitcase, Copenhagen Red Cross nurse Nina Borg sets out to assist sick children among the Hungarian Roma living in nearby Valby, even though she has promised her husband to curtail such activities because they interfere with her caring for their two children. Elsewhere, a Hungarian law student searches for his Roma half-brother, a quest that eventually leads him to Denmark and the camp in Valby, all while being tracked by Copenhagen's counterterrorism unit. Nina, with her habit of becoming enmeshed in the affairs of those less fortunate, gets caught in the middle of an explosive situation when it turns out that a substance making the Valby residents sick is not only radioactive but also on the move. Once again, Kaaberbøl and Friis balance just the right amount of action with characterization of their flawed but empathetic heroine. 10-city author tour.
September 1, 2012
Denmark's normal cycle of stealing, smuggling, forced prostitution and unauthorized aid to minority populations is disrupted by the exhumation of a truly malign object. Jorgen Skou-Larsen is a retired building inspector concerned about his wife Helle's thoroughly irresponsible financial behavior. Sandor Horvath is a law student from Budapest obsessed with passing his upcoming oral exam. Soren Kirkegard is a chief inspector in counterterrorism. And Nina Borg, familiar to American readers from The Boy in the Suitcase (2011), is a Red Cross nurse working in the Coal House Camp and secretly moonlighting with the underground Network that does what it can to ease the lives of the Roma who've found their way to Denmark. The first hints of trouble come with shocking suddenness: Nina's fellow Networker, Peter Erhardsen, an engineer with the city of Copenhagen, is taken violently and mysteriously ill with a malady that seems to have swept through the Roma community, and Sandor is arrested by police officers who are clearly convinced that he's his stepbrother, Tamas Rezmuves. The source of these problems is a sinister prize Tamas and his pal Pitkin have scavenged from an abandoned hospital building back in Hungary and arranged to sell in the global marketplace. Their scheme entangles not only them, but the rest of the cast with international sex traffickers and homegrown terrorists, pits each group of do-gooders against the others, and puts Nina and her family in particular under unimaginable pressure from some uncompromisingly evil malefactors. The pattern behind the calamity becomes clear early on, but the final indications of how the puzzle pieces dovetail will hit most readers as a shocking surprise. More grisly but more routine than Kaaberbol and Friis' striking debut, and just as sordid in its revelations about Denmark today and tomorrow.
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Starred review from October 1, 2012
Kaaberbl and Friis return with a riveting follow-up to their 2011 debut, The Boy in the Suitcase. A crusading Red Cross nurse and mother of two, Nina Borg treats a group of violently ill Roma refugees living in a Copenhagen hovel, defying her husband's request not to put the welfare of others above that of her own children. When Nina herself falls ill, she receives a chilling diagnosis: radiation sickness. Meanwhile, cautious Budapest law student Sandor Horvath searches for his half brother, a Roma teenager looking to sell deadly goods on the Danish black market, a quest that draws the attention of Danish intelligence agencies. Sandor soon faces a more serious danger--one that threatens not only his life but the lives of Nina's daughter and countless others as well. VERDICT Nina and Sandor are flawed but appealing characters, and their stories smoothly connect in the buildup to a pulse-pounding finale. With its intricate plot and revealing glimpses into Roma life, this assured thriller cements its authors' places near the top of the Scandinavian crime fiction pantheon.--Annabelle Mortensen, Skokie P.L., IL
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