Tuesday 25 June 2013

CRIME THRILLER REVIEW: The Hanging - Lotte and Soren Hammer

Release Date: 06/06/13
Publisher:  Bloomsbury

SYNOPSIS:

On a cold Monday morning before school begins, two children make a gruesome discovery. Hanging from the roof of the school gymnasium are the bodies of five naked and heavily disfigured men. Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and his team from the Murder Squad in Copenhagen are called in to investigate this horrific case - the men hanging in a geometric pattern; the scene so closely resembling a public execution. When the identities of the five victims and the disturbing link between them is leaked to the press, the sinister motivation behind the killings quickly becomes apparent to the police. Up against a building internet campaign and even members of his own team, Simonsen finds that he must battle public opinion and vigilante groups in his mission to catch the killers. A nerve-wrenching look at justice and retribution, The Hanging is a spectacular crime tale straight from the heart of Scandinavia.


REVIEW:

I’ve been a huge fan of Scandinavian Crime fiction for a number of years, they’ve known how to wind me in, give me a cracking story and for me the landscape fits the culture wonderfully giving each story its own feeling behind the lines.

Add to this a story arc that just grabbed me and to be honest this book was thrust to the top of my TBR pile before anything else. What unfurled sadly was a story that felt like the old fashioned Video’s where the blurb is so much better than the actual product. In short, the pace was jumpy, the prose misplaced so that you would even have to reread lines to get them to make sense and sadly the suspense that I was expecting was over to fast as the criminals were revealed way to early. All in, this could well have been a book that would have been better as a novella rather than the full fledged book that arrived. A great shame all in.




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