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Death of a Nightingale

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the Nordic noir duo who brought you The New York Times bestseller The Boy in the Suitcase comes a chilling new thriller with a mystery seventy-years in the making.
Nina. Natasha. Olga. Three women united by one terrifying secret. But only one of them has killed to keep it.
Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian woman who has been convicted for the attempted murder of her Danish ex-fiancé, escapes police custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen’s police headquarters. That same night, the ex-fiancé’s frozen, tortured body is found in a car. It isn’t the first time the young Ukrainian woman has lost a partner to violent ends: her first husband was murdered three years earlier in Kiev in the same manner.
Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has followed Natasha’s case for years now, ever since Natasha first took refuge at her crisis center. Nina just can’t see the young mother as a vicious killer. But in her effort to protect Natasha’s daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she didn’t know about Natasha and her past. The mystery has long and bloody roots, going back to a terrible famine that devastated Stalinist Ukraine in 1934, when a ten-year-old girl with the voice of a nightingale sang her family into shallow graves.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 23, 2013
      Artfully drawn characters who are a pleasure to know populate Kaaberbøl and Friis’s excellent third thriller featuring nurse Nina Borg (after 2013’s Invisible Murder). At a Red Cross crisis center in Copenhagen known as Coal-House Camp, Nina bonds with Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian refuge. Natasha is arrested for the attempted murder of her abusive Danish fiancé, but Nina believes she is innocent, even after Natasha escapes from custody and the fiancé is brutally slain. Meanwhile, two Ukrainian police officers arrive in Copenhagen looking for Natasha to question her about the murder of her husband, Pavel, three years earlier in Kiev. Nina asks for help from Søren Kirkegard, a member of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, whom she knows slightly and trusts implicitly. Woven in with the present-day narrative are scenes from 1934 Ukraine, where two sisters are starving in a nightmare childhood. The stories eventually link up, of course, with one final clever twist.

    • Kirkus

      November 1, 2013
      The third installment of the Nina Borg trilogy (Invisible Murder, 2012, etc.) shuttles back and forth between a nerve-racking present and an unspeakable past. Now that she's been arrested for trying to stab her abusive fiance, Michael Vestergaard, to death, what else can go wrong in Natasha Doroshenko's life? Hours after she escapes the police officers transferring her from her prison cell to a Copenhagen station for questioning, someone succeeds in killing Vestergaard, and police commissioner Mona Heide is convinced it's Natasha. Only Nina Borg, a nurse who observed Natasha and her daughter Katerina, 8, at the Coal-House Camp, believes that she escaped to take her daughter away from the camp, not to finish the job on her former lover. As Natasha, Nina and the police, with the unwanted assistance of a mysterious pair of Ukrainian cops, work at desperate cross-purposes in the present, trouble is brewing in Ukraine during the famine of 1934. Olga Trofimenko's father, Andreij, who has brought his wife and children--Olga, her older sister, Oxana, and their younger brother, Kolja--to Mykolayevka so that he can manage the collective farm there, abandons his family to take up with another woman, throwing them on the dubious mercies of their doctrinaire schoolteacher, Comrade Semienova, and Uncle Stalin. Sooner or later, of course, this grim past will collide with the troubled present, and trying to imagine how they'll come together, and whether their connection will justify all the threatened coincidences and loose ends, is the chief pleasure this ice-cold thriller offers. The most conventionally plotted of Nina's three adventures, and the one in which she has the least to do, is still required reading for fans of the burgeoning field of new Nordic suspense.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      September 15, 2013

      In the third book of this Scandinavian crime series (after Invisible Murder), Red Cross nurse Nina Borg is once again involved in the lives of Eastern European immigrants living in Denmark. She has been treating an eight-year-old Ukrainian girl at a Red Cross center while the girl's mother, Natasha Doroshenko, is in police custody. Natasha has been arrested for murdering her Danish fiance. After Natasha escapes custody on the way to Copenhagen's police headquarters, her only goal is to be reunited with her daughter. However, someone tries to abduct the child from the center. As Nina investigates the attempted abduction, she realizes she knows very little about Natasha's life in the Ukraine and will discover that the secret may lie far in the past--back to the Stalinist 1930s. On a personal level, Nina, now divorced, is trying to keep her relationship with her own two children while attempting to safeguard the other woman's child. VERDICT While the parallel story line describing family life in 1930s Ukraine at times is disruptive to the main plot, fans of the duo's previous books will not be disappointed. The authors maintain similar tension and mood as in their earlier books, and Nina Borg remains determined to protect those whom others might see as outcasts from society.--Jean King, West Hempstead P.L., NY

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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