I've always enjoyed books about books, and an unpublished thriller manuscript plays a huge role in this story.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!
