After she made her debut in 2016, Katrine Engberg has become a steady supplier of quality crime from our flat neighboring country to the south. This year’s novel, “The Burning Blade”, is the first in a new series with investigator Liv Jensen in the lead role. In this novel, Engberg uses for the first time the stories of his own Jewish father, which go back to the persecution of Jews during the Nazi regime during the Second World War. In the middle of a rich gallery of people, we find investigator and ex-police officer Liv Jensen. Liv has just quit her job with the Aalborg police and moved to Copenhagen, the hectic big city. Here she seeks a job as an investigator in the Copenhagen police, but for the time being has to settle for monitoring insurance fraudsters. Close and trustworthy Liv has its antisocial aspects, and has good reasons for that. Although she does not feel naturally at home in the stressful Danish capital, she finds something reminiscent of a home in the basement dormitory where she moves into Vesterbro. Here she gets to know the landlords on the floor above, Hannah and Jan Leon. A daughter and a father who share at least one great sorrow. In the backyard, she also meets Nima, a car mechanic of Iranian descent, a tough guy with his own little menagerie of demons. Yes, this is undoubtedly the kind of crime where the personal and emotional gets a lot of space, but that suits it. Engberg writes closely and believably about individual people’s doubts and longing to belong. Back to the past Fortunately, let’s say for the crime plot, Liv Jensen has a mentor in the Copenhagen police. He has certain jobs he wants outsourced. This mentor assigns her to take another look at the murder of culture journalist Gert Linde, who was found strangled in his own apartment. It is true that the man had a poisonous pen, but the suspicion is not primarily in the direction of offended writers and cultural figures. Instead, Liv must travel back to Northern Jutland, where Gert Linde spent the last years of his life working on a book project about the farm he grew up on. This will be a journey back into the past, which will bring to life ghosts from the days of the war, but also highly alive figures from Liv’s own past – the one she had escaped to Copenhagen to escape. Holds the interest Katrine Engberg has here put together a complex intrigue that holds the interest until the last moment. MEET THE AUTHOR: What does a corpse look like after being in a suitcase for three months? Katrine Engberg meets forensic experts to try out her ideas. You have to go over the action with a magnifying glass in retrospect to be able to see that there are too many random coincidences, because Engberg manages to camouflage these coincidences well. The novel works perfectly well as suspense literature. Where it really excels is the psychological insight into the inner lives of the characters. Katrine Engberg succeeds in this mysterious art of writing fictional characters who are so believable, so real, that we become part of them and care about them. This is the real art of poetry, something that neither IQ scores nor years at writing school can help you with, if you don’t have it. Katrine Engberg has it. “Det brennende bladet” has become a low-key, sober crime from the first lady of Danish crime. news reviews Photo: Bonnier Title: “The burning blade” Author: Katrine Engberg Translated by: Monica Carlsen Genre: Crime Published: 2023 Number of pages: 392 Publisher: Bonnier Hi! My name is Ola Hegdal, and I read and review books for news. Preferably crime and suspense literature, or non-fiction. Feel free to read my review of “The Anomaly” by Hervé Le Tellier, “You are a farmer” by Kristin Auestad Danielsen or “The Night Runner” by Karin Fossum.
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“Det brennende bladet” by Katrine Engberg – Reviews and recommendations
