Call Me Princess

When an online flirtation leads to a brutal rape, Detective Inspector Louise Rick gets put on the case.  The victim, Susanne Hansson, doesn't know her attacker's real name, and can't even give the police a good description of him. And Louise starts to think they might never catch this guy. Then another rape victim is found.  Only this time she didn't survive the attack. But it appears that she, too, met her attacker online. Now Louise must put herself at risk and enter the online dating world in order to catch this faceless predator before he rapes again.

Sara Blaedel writes a solid police procedural. It's set in Copenhagen.  And her main character, Louise Rick, is a good cop who's better at her job than she is with her personal relationships. I didn't like her best friend, Camilla, a journalist who also puts her job first, quite as much. The victim, Susanne, drove me crazy. And while the mystery itself is interesting, it isn't as suspenseful or as gripping as I hoped it would be. I also felt things wrapped up a little too neatly and a little too fast at the end.  Call Me Princess isn't a bad read, but it's not exactly an unputdownable page-turner either. Still, I liked it enough to give this author another try. (I think her novel The Forgotten Girls looks intriguing.) Be warned about this one:  there are two fairly graphic rape scenes in it. They are easy to skip over though, and the rest of the book isn't really dark or violent at all. In fact, as Nordic crime fiction goes, this one is fairly tame.

Happy Reading!

The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg

I don't like clowns, but 42-year-old Kaspar Krone is not your average clown.  Among his extraordinary skills is the ability to hear hidden symphonies in a cityscape, sonatas in a beating heart, and the rich undertones and counter melodies of thought and intent in someone's voice.  That makes him the perfect person to find KlaraMaria, a missing girl with special skills of her own.  The only trouble is that everyone in Copenhagen wants to find KlaraMaria, to control her, and Kaspar has no idea who is telling the truth, or who he can trust--added complications in his already complicated life.

Hoeg's novel weaves together Kaspar's past and present with the music of Bach and the wisdom of the great philosophers.  Hoeg does make some jumps in time in this novel which are a bit hard to follow, and it isn't always easy telling the good guys from the bad, but Kaspar is such an engaging character, I willingly followed him through all 408 pages.  He is one of the great clowns, and his performance in this book is not only memorable, but masterful!