Death of a Nightingale Hardcover - 2013

Excerpt

“Go on,” says a man’s voice.
          “I’m tired.” An older woman answers, clearly uncomfortable and dismissive.
          “But it’s so exciting.”
          “Exciting?” there’s a sharp lash of bitterness to her reaction. “A bit of Saturday entertainment. Is that what it is for you?”
          “No, I didn’t mean it like that.”
          They are both speaking Ukrainian, he quickly and informally, she more hesitantly.
          In the background you can hear occasional beeps from an electronic game.
          “It’s important for posterity.”
          The old woman laughs now, a hard and unhappy laughter.
          “Posterity,” she says. “Do you mean the child? Isn’t she better off not knowing?”
          “If that’s how you see it. We should be getting home anyway.”
          “No,” the word is abrupt. “Not yet. You can stay a little longer.”
          “You said you were tired,” says the man.
          “No. Not…. that tired.”
          “I don’t mean to press you.”
          “No, I know that. You just thought it was exciting.”
          “Forget that I said that. It was stupid.”  
          “No, no. Children like exciting stories. Fairytales.”
 
          “I was thinking more along the lines of something real. Something you experienced yourself.”
          Again a short pause.
          “No, let me tell you a story,” the old woman then says suddenly. “A fairytale. A little fairytale from Stalin land. A suitable bedtime story for our little girl. Are you listening, my sweet?”
          Beep, beep, beep-beep. An unclear mumbling from the child. Apparently she isn’t  really paying much attention, but that doesn’t stop the old woman.
          “Once upon a time there were two sisters, “she begins, clearly as if reciting. “Two sisters who both sang so beautifully that the nightingale had to stop singing when it heard them. First one sang for the emperor and in that way caused many people’s undoing. The other one resented that and she began to sing too “
          “Who are you talking about?” the man asks. “Is it you? Is it someone we know?”
          The old woman ignores him. There’s a harsh ring to her voice. As if she is using the story to punish him.
          “When the emperor heard her, his heart grew inflamed and he had to own her,” she continued. “Come to me,” he begged. You can be sure he begged.
          “Come to me and be my nightingale. I’ll give you gold and beautiful clothes and a servant for every finger.”
 
          Here the old woman stops. It’s as if she doesn’t really feel like going on, and the man no longer presses her. But the story has its own relentless logic, and she has to finish it.
          “At first she refused. She rejected the emperor. But he persisted. “What should I give you then?” he asked, because he had learned that everything has a price. “I will not come to you,” said the other sister, ‘before you give me my evil sister’s head on a platter.’”
          In the background the beeping sounds from the child’s game have ceased. Now there is only an attentive silence.
          “When the emperor saw that a heart as black as sin hid behind the beautiful song,” the old woman continues, still using her fairytale voice: “He not only killed the first sister, but also the nightingale’s father and mother and grandfather and grandmother and whole family. ‘That’s what you get for your jealousy,’ he said and threw her out.”
          The child utters a sound, a frightened squeak.  The old woman doesn’t seem to notice.
          “Tell me, “ she whispers. “Which of them is me?”
          “You’re both alive,” says the man. “So something in the story must be a lie.”
          “In Stalin land, Stalin decides what is true and what’s a lie,” says the old woman. “And I said that it was a Stalin fairytale.”
          “Daddy,” says the child. “I want to go home now…”
 
          “GUM?”
          Natasha started; she had been sitting silently, looking out the window to one side where Copenhagen gliding by in frozen, stiff and gray colors. Dirty house fronts. Dirty snow and a dirty low sky where the sun had barely managed to rise about the rooftops in the course of the day. The car’s tires hissed in the soap-like mixture of snow, ice and salt which covered the asphalt. None of it had anything to do with her, and she noted it all without really seeing it.
          “You speak Danish, don’t you?”
          The policeman in the passenger seat had turned toward her and offered a little, blue-white pack, and she nodded and took a piece. Said thank you. He smiled at her and turned back into his seat.
          This wasn’t the “bus” as they called it – the usual transport from Vestre Prison to the court—that Natasha had been on. It was an ordinary patrol car; the police were ordinary Danish policemen.  One, the one who had given her the gum, was a young man, thirty at the most. The other was old and fat and seemed nice enough. Danish police had kind eyes. Even that time with Michael and the knife, they had spoken calmly and kindly to her as if she hadn’t been a criminal they were arresting but rather a patient going to the hospital.
          One day, before too long, two of these kind men would put her and Katerina on a flight back to the Ukraine, but that’s not what was happening today. Not yet. It couldn’t be. Her asylum case had not yet been decided, and Katerina was not with her. Besides, you didn’t need to go through Copenhagen to get to the airport, that much she knew. This was the way to police headquarters.
          Natasha placed her hands on her light blue jeans, rubbed them back and forth hard across the rough fabric, opened and closed them quickly. Finally she made an effort  to let her fists rest on her knees while she looked out at Copenhagen and tried to figure out if the trip into the city brought her closer to or farther from Katerina. During the last months, the walls and the physical distance that separated them had become an obsession. She was closer to her daughter when she ate in the canteen than when she was in her cell. The trip to the yard was also several meters in the wrong direction, but still felt soothing because it was as if she was breathing the same air as Katerina. On the library computer she had found Google Street View and dragged the flat little man in to the parking lot in front of the prison, further along Copenhagen’s streets and up the highway entrance ramp to northern Sealand. It was as if she could walk next to him the whole way and see houses and store fronts and trees and cars, but when he reached Kulhus Camp, he couldn’t go any further. Here she had to make do with the grubby satellite image of the camp’s flat barrack roofs. She had stared at the pictures until she went nearly insane. She had imagined that one of the tiny dots was Katerina. Dreamed of getting closer. From the prison, it was 23 kilometers to Kulhus Camp. From the center of Copenhagen it was probably a few kilometers more, but on the other hand, there were neither walls nor barbed wire between her and the camp right now. There was only the policemen’s thin steel shell, air and wind, kilometers of asphalt and later fields and wet forest floor.
          She knew it wouldn’t do any good, but still stretched out her hand and let it touch the young policeman’s shoulder.
          “You still don’t know anything?” she asked in English.
          His eyes met hers in the rear view mirror. His gaze was apologetic but also indifferent. He shook his head.
          “We’re just chauffeurs,” he said. “We aren’t usually told stuff like that.”
          She leaned back in her seat and started to rub her palms against her jeans.  Opened and closed her hands. Neither of the two policemen knew what she was doing at police headquarters. They had nothing for her except chewing gum.
          The case with Michael was long finished, so that probably wasn’t what it was about, and her asylum case had never yet required interviews interrogations anywhere but Kulhus Camp.
          Natasha felt the fear make her stomach contract, so she had to shit and pee at the same time. If she had just had Katerina there. If they had just been together. At night in the prison she had the most terrible nightmares about Katerina alone in the children’s barrack, surrounded by flames.
          Or Katerina making her way alone into the swamp behind the camp.
          It was unnatural for a mother not to be able to reach out and touch her child. Natasha knew she was behaving exactly like the cows when their calves were taken from them in the fall, and they stood, their shrill bellowing lasting for hours,, without knowing which way to direct their sorrow. She had tried to relieve her restlessness with cold logic. She and Katerina were not separated forever, she told herself. She came to visit once in a while with Nina, the lady from Kulhus Camp, who reassured Natasha every time that she would personally take care of Katerina. Rina, the Danes called her. They thought that was her name because that’s what the papers said. But Rina wasn’t even a name. It was what was left over when a little man in Dublin had done what he could to veil the original text.
          Maybe that’s why she was here? Had they discovered what the man in Dublin had done?
          Her dread of the future rose like the tide. Her jaw muscles tightened painfully, and when she crushed the compact piece of gum between her teeth, everything in her mouth felt sticky and metallic.

Media reviews

Praise for Death of a Nightingale

A BBC Front Row Best Crime Novel of 2013
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Mystery of 2013
A Book Page Best Mystery & Thriller of 2013
An IndieNext Selection for November, 2013
A Public Library Association LibraryReads Selection

"[Nina] joins the sisterhood of run-amok heroines like Homeland's Carrie Mathison and Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Nina doesn't just have a bee in her bonnet — she has a whole hive. And it's buzzing away in her latest adventure, Death of a Nightingale, an elaborately plotted page-turner that flits from today's liberal-minded Denmark and mobbed-up Ukraine to the starvation-racked Soviet Union of the Stalinist '30s."
—John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air

"Death of a Nightingale is a gripping and elegant tapestry of a novel. A seamless weaving of psychological depth and rocket-paced plotting, the story hooked me in and the strong, complicated, and fascinating women at its center kept me utterly riveted cover-to-cover.  Nina Borg is one of my new favorite heroines!"
—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of In the Blood

"Feminist outrage fuels the politically pointed novels of the Danish writing partners Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis....Nina is all heart and her efforts to bring justice to women like Natasha are heroic."
—New York Times Book Review

"A moving story... [Kaaberbol and Friis] tell a socially conscious—and, at times, critical—tale about immigration issues that apply both to Denmark and the U.S. without sacrificing the urgency of the best thrillers."
—Oprah.com

"Required reading for fans of the burgeoning field of new Nordic suspense."
—Kirkus

"There are two parallel stories told in this exciting mystery. The main story is about a beautiful young Russian woman, Natasha, accused by the Ukrainian authorities of murdering her husband. She manages to escape with her young daughter to Denmark. Subsequently she is sent to a Danish prison for the murder of her fiancée. There are many clues that seem to demonstrate her innocence, but someone prefers that the truth be left unknown. The second story line takes place around 1934 when Stalin was in power. Oxana, also called the nightingale of the people, and her younger sister Olga are featured. The dreadful circumstances of their lives have tentacles that reach far into the future, and collide with the fate of Natasha and her daughter.  The mystery builds and builds in intensity until it is almost impossible to put the book down."
—ABA IndieNext Selection

“Compulsive do-gooder Nina Borg is now involved with Ukrainian detainees seeking asylum in Denmark. Among them are Natasha, an abused refugee and widow of a slain journalist, and her anxious 8-year-old daughter, Katerina. The two are pursued by a mysterious, powerful Ukrainian woman and Danish security forces, who consider Natasha a suspect in her fiance’s murder. Two plots gradually merge in a dramatic climax. Recommended for fans of Karin Fossum, Arnaldur Indridison, Colin Cotterill and mystery lovers who prefer plots that explore social justice and morality.”
—PLA LibraryReads Selection

"Artfully drawn characters who are a pleasure to know populate Kaaberbøl and Friis’s excellent third thriller featuring nurse Nina Borg... 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."
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review

"Nina is an imperfect hero, which makes her all the more appealing."
—The Boston Globe

"[The] latest Nina Borg mystery grips... A sense of mystery and threat looms large over the gloomy, ice-bound landscape."
—The Independent (UK)

"The authors follow their 2011 Nordic noir hit The Boy in the Suitcase with this intense murder mystery, once again starring Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg. Intricate, compelling and dark."
—The Sacramento Bee

"Explores a different kind of trauma, with deep, twisting roots in the forced famine of Stalin in Eastern Europe of the 1930s... This well-crafted book takes us to the inevitable conclusion that, while life can go on after the worst of the worst, the past is always with us."
—Buffalo News

"Scandinavian Crime Aficionados will love this chilling modern thriller."
—Mystery Tribune

"Readers who like historical fiction will nonetheless find themselves intrigued by the emotionally resonant portrayal of the sisters growing up in extraordinary times, and readers who like thrillers that touch on women’s issues will appreciate the sketches of two women, one determined to save her child at any cost, the other obsessed with saving the world one person at a time." 
—Booklist

"Fascinating and terrifying."
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Fans of the duo's previous books will not be disappointed."
—Library Journal

"The Danish duo just keeps getting better... [Death of a Nightingale] is near perfect."
—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick

"One police character in Death of a Nightingale describes Nina Borg as “hostile to authority and borderline paranoid.” That’s one way of looking at our Nina’s heroism."
—Toronto Star

"Once again, Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis have constructed an emotional roller coaster ride peopled by characters of marvelous depth and nuance."
—Kittling Books

"Kaaberbøl and Friis have served up a complex, compelling mystery, one that is filled with fascinating characters, provocative themes, and plenty of pulse-pounding action."
—BookLoons

"Kaaberbøl and Friis are among the very best writers in the current crop of Scandinavian crime writers." 
—Glenn Harper, International Noir Fiction

"Ultimately a story of families torn apart, both in the present and in the past... A welcome addition to an already outstanding panoply of Scandinavian crime novels."
—Crimespree Magazine

"This is the third in the Nina Borg series, and this latest title certainly caters to the mystery (and slightly gory) reader.... Readers will discover the reason for the gory fable at the beginning, and by the end of the book, they’ll be cheering."
—Suspense Magazine

"Intricately woven, utterly compelling."
—Criminal Element

"How can I put this? It seems wrong to say it’s entertaining or a pleasure to read, because it will make you sad and angry and ache with sympathy. Yet it’s a story that you will care about and the plot will propel you forward. Perhaps the most accurate words for it are “thrilling” and “unforgettable.”  It’s a very good book."
—Barbara Fister, Scandinavian Crime Fiction

"The contemporary story alternates with a riveting account of life in Ukraine in the 1930s, first during the famine and the campaign against the kulaks... Two little girls are at the center of this story, one eight, the other ten. What they did as children and what was done to them is still reverberating seventy years on."
—Reviewing the Evidence

"Loved this... A terrific story of how the past can continue on and  spread its tentacles into the future."
—Before It's News

"A stunning indictment of all that was wrong with Stalinist Russia...[and] a story that will leave the reader on the edge of the seat until the end."
—Deadly Pleasures

"Suspense that captivates you and characters that quickly become much more than just clever constructions."
—Extra (Ekstra Bladet, Denmark)

"Incredibly well written with both an original and suspenseful plot."
—Politken (Denmark)

"Captivating, fast-paced and moving."
—The Jutland Post (Jyllands-Posten, Denmark)

"Elegantly told and thankfully completely without any of the normal clichés that otherwise rule the genre. A really well composed thriller."
—West Jutland News (JydskeVestkysten, Denmark)