A mother's love A novel

Louise Rick's quest to reinstate Denmark's national police mobile task force suffers a lackluster start when she's allocated a bare-bones team with questionable experience. Their first case tests their mettle. Dorthe Hyllested, admired for valiantly keeping her rural inn afloat after her husband Nils' sudden death, has been bludgeoned to death. Right out of the gate, Louise's team discovers a hidden room in Dorthe's apartment that recently held a child who is now nowhere to be found. None of the locals admit they've seen a child with Dorthe. In a decidedly uncomfortable turn, Louise's ex-fiancé, Eik, Copenhagen's top missing persons detective, joins the investigation to find the child. When the inn's role in a coercive sex tourism scheme is uncovered, Louise questions whether Dorthe was an innocent bystander and how this revelation relates to the mystery child. In this eleventh episode, Louise Rick (last featured in A Harmless Lie, 2022) confronts the brass' bottom line, personal losses, and regrets: the resulting character evolution and the increasingly depraved case propel this haunting procedural.

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 forMorgenavisen, 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.