From the Nordic noir duo who brought you The New York Times bestseller The Boy in the Suitcase comes a chilling new thriller with a mystery seventy-years in the making – THE DEATH OF A NIGHTINGALE by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis.
Nina. Natasha. Olga. Three women united by one terrifying secret. But only one of them has killed to keep it.
Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian woman who has been convicted of the attempted murder of her Danish fiancé, escapes police custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen’s police headquarters. That night, the frozen, tortured body of Michael, the ex-fiancé, is found in a car, and the manhunt for Natasha escalates. It isn’t the first time the young Ukrainian woman has lost a partner to violent ends: her first husband was also murdered, three years earlier in Kiev, and in the same manner: tortured to death in a car.
Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has been following Natasha’s case for several years now, since Natasha first took refuge at a crisis center where Nina works. Nina, who had tried to help Natasha leave her abusive fiancé more than once, just can’t see the young Ukrainian mother as a vicious killer. But in her effort to protect Natasha’s daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she didn’t know about this woman and her past. The mystery has long and bloody roots, going back to a terrible famine that devastated Stalinist Ukraine in 1934, when a ten-year-old girl with the voice of a nightingale sang her family into shallow graves.
Praise for Death of a Nightingale
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Mystery for Fall 2013
An IndieNext Selection for November, 2013
“Artfully drawn characters who are a pleasure to know populate Kaaberbøl and Friis’s excellent third thriller featuring nurse Nina Borg… Woven in with the present-day narrative are scenes from 1934 Ukraine, where two sisters are starving in a nightmare childhood. The stories eventually link up, of course, with one final clever twist.”—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)
“Death of a Nightingale is a gripping and elegant tapestry of a novel. A seamless weaving of psychological depth and rocket-paced plotting, the story hooked me in and the strong, complicated, and fascinating women at its center kept me utterly riveted cover-to-cover. Nina Borg is one of my new favorite heroines!”—Lisa Unger, Author of In the Blood
“Kaaberbøl and Friis are among the very best writers in the current crop of Scandinavian crime writers.”
—Glenn Harper, International Noir Fiction