The Tenant by Katrine Engberg

I decided that in 2020 I wanted to read more adult books and less YA. Not that YA isn't awesome, I just found that I wasn't enjoying the genre overall as much as I used to. One of my favorite adult genres is the thriller genre, so I was eager to pick up this Danish crime thriller as one of my first reads of the year. The Tenant by Katrine Engberg takes place in Copenhagen, and follows detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner as they try to solve the case of young torture and murder victim, Julie Stender.

I've always enjoyed books about books, and an unpublished thriller manuscript plays a huge role in this story. It did start off quite slow, but after pushing through the first 100 pages or so I found that it did pick up a little bit. On the flip side of that, I found the ending to be rushed. The reveal was also quite complicated. I did appreciate that I wasn't able to figure it out, since I do find a lot of thrillers to be predictable.

I typically don't read a lot of police-centric thrillers because I usually find the detectives to be pretentious and the plot to be dry. That being said, I loved the duo of Jeppe and Anette in this read! I would have liked to have seen more of Anette's perspective, as the majority of this read was focused on Jeppe and his personal back story. I thought it was a little unbalanced, since he had so many personal things happening in addition to the plot. Maybe since this appears to be the first in a series following the duo, we will get more of Anette's story in the next book. You also got the points of view of a few other characters in this story as well, which helped give further insight into the case.

I don't think I've ever read a Nordic crime fiction before, but from what I've gathered from other people's reviews, they tend to have certain characteristics that are distinctive of the genre. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about them to determine whether or not this book is true to the genre! I can say that the writing flowed well, and I couldn't tell that this book wasn't originally written in English.

Overall it was a solid read, but there were those few things I thought could have been done better.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

Thanks so much to Scout Press for a finished copy of this read! The Tenant by Katrine Engberg releases TOMORROW, January 14th, so be sure to pick up a copy!