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THE CORPSE FLOWER

 



SYNOPSIS

Danish journalist Heloise Kaldan is in the middle of a nightmare. One of her sources has been caught lying, and she could lose her job over it. And then she receives the first in a series of cryptic letters from an alleged killer.

Anna Kiel is wanted for murder but hasn’t been seen by anyone in three years. When the reporter who first wrote about the case is found murdered in his apartment, detective Erik Schafer comes up with the first lead. Has Anna Kiel struck again? If so, why does every clue point directly to Heloise Kaldan?

As Heloise starts digging deeper she realises that to tell Anna’s story she will have to revisit her darkest past, and confront the one person she swore she’d never see again…



Title: The Corpse Flower
Author: Anne Mette Hancock
Series: Kaldan & Schäfer #1
Publisher: Swift Press 
Publication date: March 3, 2022



REVIEW

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Amorphophallus titanium (a.k.a. Corpse Flower): flowering plant that reeks of rotting flesh and death when in bloom.

Don’t you just love when you read a book you really like and then you find out it’s part of a series? And a Nordic Noir series at that. Even better! The Corpse Flower was such a promising debut. I just can’t wait for book 2 to be published later this year.

When Danish journalist Heloise Kaldan starts receiving cryptic messages from Anna Kiel, a woman accused of killing a lawyer three years before and who fled the country, she’ll have to dig into the darkest parts of her past to uncover what connects her to Anna.

My love of Nordic Noir is well known to all, and The Corpse Flower was a great example of why I love the genre. A complex story that proves darker and darker as it progresses with a couple of main character quite interesting, really well developed and that have a lot of room to grow.

I love it when the journalism world collides with a police investigation. I always find so interesting the contrast between their investigative methods and the limits that may or may not be exceeded by each of them. Even though both are looking for the same end result, their interests while on the way to that result may not always match. The banter between Heloise and Schäfer was fantastic and dosed with small pills of humour that lightened the mood a little bit. 

The resolution went in a direction I did not predict and that was much darker than expected and that, as the corpse flower of the title, gave away a rotting stench that made that last chapter even more satisfying if possible. 

A gripping and dark story that will appeal to all fans of police procedurals and that left me wanting to read more about Kaldan and Schäfer soon (I just found out I was approved for an eARC of The Collector, the second book in the series, coming out next November. YAYYY!!!)

Thanks to NetGalley and Swift Press for providing and eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

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