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A review by marilynw
The Girl Without Skin by Mads Peder Nordbo
4.0
Publisher's description of the book:
When a mummified Viking corpse is discovered on Greenland ice sheet, journalist Matthew Cave is sent out to report on the finding. The next day, the mummy has disappeared. The body of the police guard lies on the ice naked and flayed, echoing a gruesome series of unsolved murders from many years earlier. With no faith in the police, the only person Matthew dares to trust is a young Greenlandic woman who, at fourteen years old, was charged with killing her father in the same shocking manner. Nordbo has staked out a new frontier in Nordic Crime, setting his story against the forbidding beauty of Greenland.
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A warning to anyone who is interested in reading this book...the number of flayed, gutted, bodies rises during this book and some of the deaths are told in great detail, from the point of view of the person being gutted. This is not a book for the faint of heart with human death, seal death, incest and rape of young girls. I rarely read books with this much violence but I was interested in the "mystery" part of the book.
The book jumps between the present (2014) and 1973 as a reporter in the present, Matt, and a police officer in the past, Jakob, investigate bodies, deaths, and more, that may be connected. You will feel the cold, the wet, the dreariness of the Greenland area where the book takes place. As the book goes from one timeline to the other, it's easy to not realize exactly how much takes place in such a short time span, in each timeline. The is a lot of action packed into short amounts of time.
Both timelines have a huge number of characters and places, with very unfamiliar names, to me, so it was often hard to remember who was who and what was what. The story is complex and there is a lot to remember from one timeline to the next. I would like to have felt clearer about everything that happened yet I know that my preference for less gruesome crime descriptions and unfamiliarity with most names, may have influenced my ability to enjoy the book more. I did enjoy the characters, especially the police officer Jakob and would have liked to have known more about him.
Published June 11th 2019
I rated this book 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. Thank you to Text Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.
When a mummified Viking corpse is discovered on Greenland ice sheet, journalist Matthew Cave is sent out to report on the finding. The next day, the mummy has disappeared. The body of the police guard lies on the ice naked and flayed, echoing a gruesome series of unsolved murders from many years earlier. With no faith in the police, the only person Matthew dares to trust is a young Greenlandic woman who, at fourteen years old, was charged with killing her father in the same shocking manner. Nordbo has staked out a new frontier in Nordic Crime, setting his story against the forbidding beauty of Greenland.
**********************************
A warning to anyone who is interested in reading this book...the number of flayed, gutted, bodies rises during this book and some of the deaths are told in great detail, from the point of view of the person being gutted. This is not a book for the faint of heart with human death, seal death, incest and rape of young girls. I rarely read books with this much violence but I was interested in the "mystery" part of the book.
The book jumps between the present (2014) and 1973 as a reporter in the present, Matt, and a police officer in the past, Jakob, investigate bodies, deaths, and more, that may be connected. You will feel the cold, the wet, the dreariness of the Greenland area where the book takes place. As the book goes from one timeline to the other, it's easy to not realize exactly how much takes place in such a short time span, in each timeline. The is a lot of action packed into short amounts of time.
Both timelines have a huge number of characters and places, with very unfamiliar names, to me, so it was often hard to remember who was who and what was what. The story is complex and there is a lot to remember from one timeline to the next. I would like to have felt clearer about everything that happened yet I know that my preference for less gruesome crime descriptions and unfamiliarity with most names, may have influenced my ability to enjoy the book more. I did enjoy the characters, especially the police officer Jakob and would have liked to have known more about him.
Published June 11th 2019
I rated this book 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. Thank you to Text Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.