DARKNESS CALLS

A Danish detective is blackmailed into exacting vigilante justice in Krefeld’s thriller.

Inspector Cecilie Mars is a Copenhagen police detective with impressive sleuthing instincts, a barren personal life, an intermittent drug habit, and nightmares of past trauma. One night, as she’s tailing a rape suspect, she sees his car crash, struggles with him after he attacks her, and improperly flees the scene; after he turns up dead, Cecilie receives a video of the encounter edited to appear that she killed him. “Lazarus,” the anonymous maker of the video, threatens to publicize it unless she agrees to carry out his agenda to kill rapists and murderers who got off with light sentences courtesy of Denmark’s lax justice system (and who are presumably plotting new crimes). Her involvement grows deeper and bloodier with each assignment until Lazarus tasks her with killing her own rapist, a man who assaulted her when she was 17 and has now kidnapped a new victim. This tortuous situation ties Cecilie up in moral knots: The monsters Lazarus has her hunting must be stopped, yet she’s also committing serious offenses—and probably being set up by Lazarus to be framed for murder. In Giles’ deft English translation, Krefeld’s tale is an intricate police procedural, taut with intrigue that explodes into terrifying violence, and a gritty depiction of a far-from-quaint Copenhagen characterized by cynical legal bureaucrats, grim concrete high-rises, and menacing street gangs. The prose is energetic and colorful, even Wagnerian at times—“You shall be my thrall in Valhalla!” thunders one psycho as he prepares to sacrifice a woman to Odin—but equally adept at evoking the queasy, claustrophobic feeling of victimization (revisiting her attack, Cecilie bleakly recalls “[t]he smell of urine emanating from him, mixing with the stench of the dumpsters. His limpness. The many slaps to her face that he delivered, slowly making him hard and ready.”) The result is an engrossing page-turner as Cecilie snakes her way through a seemingly inescapable maze.

Choice Nordic noir featuring a pressure-cooker scenario, gripping action, and nerve-wracking psychological tension.