Sara Blædel is a Danish crime novelist, publisher, and former journalist, best known for her ‘Louise Rick’ series of police procedurals which have enjoyed considerable popularity, for some time, in her native Denmark. Until very recently, only a minority of these have been available in English translation (the first book, Grønt støv (Green Dust), has never been released in English), and the task of the English-language reader is complicated by the different titles given to several of the books in UK versus US editions. I’ve previously reviewed Blædel’s ‘English-language debut’ (i.e., book 2 in the Louise Rick series), Blue Blood / Call Me Princess, here.
The Night Women (Aldrig mere fri, 2012, translated by Erik J Macki and Tara F Chace), previously published as Farewell to Freedom, is the fourth in the series. (It’s technically the first I’ve read, since my prior encounter with Call Me Princess / Blue Blood was as an audiobook.) Louise is called in as an investigator on the murder of an unidentified woman in Copenhagen’s red light district. There’s speculation that the victim, whose throat has been slashed, may have been a prostitute; it’s subsequently found that she’s an Eastern European woman who has indeed been working the streets, though not out of choice, following her abduction in the Czech Republic and subsequent forced relocation. When other attacks occur in the same vicinity, the police’s determination to catch those responsible becomes more intense, even as other cases deplete their available manpower. Rick and her longstanding journalist friend Camilla Lind investigate various factors around the woman’s murder, to some extent at cross purposes, and it’s only as events threaten to spiral out of control that the true motivation for the spate of attacks becomes apparent.
Blædel’s work fits solidly into the ‘nordic noir’ paradigm of socially-aware crime fiction, and is equally at home with domesticity as with brutality. There’s a strong sense here that her characters, on all sides of the law, have a life and are not merely actors for the purposes of the plot. This, obviously, is one of the requirements of a good procedural, but there is nonetheless a balancing act between maintaining intrigue, conveying topicality, and retaining a reasonable degree of realism. The Night Women does just fine on this score, and the central mystery is sufficiently layered to defy simple second-guessing. This is a well-researched and well-realised crime novel which ends with a thump.
Simon Petrie 