BLOOD SONG

When a Swedish recruit working for Scotland Yard learns that her rich and prominent family has been murdered, she cannot imagine that events from different decades and countries will come into play during the investigation.

During Franco’s brutal regime in Spain of the 1930s, women were imprisoned, raped, and forced to give up their children. In the Spanish orphanages of the following decades, a group of young girls banded together as best as they could against the abuse of the adults in charge. But Aliénor Lindbergh, a Scotland Yard recruit, knows none of this, or how it might affect her, when she hears the news about her family in 2016. She returns to Sweden with Yard profiler Emily Roy and true-crime writer Alexis Castells, and soon the search for answers goes in myriad directions. The Lindberghs ran a fertility clinic, and unsettling rumors about their practices are rife; meanwhile, Alexis is supposed to be planning a wedding—will it be able to proceed? The author of this series (Keeper, 2017, etc.) frequently assumes that readers have read the earlier novels; several references to partnerships, etc., are uncertain to new readers, and even the author’s talent for creating vivid characters gets lost in this convoluted tale.

Readers new to this series will find it hard to get engaged in the coincidence-laden story.