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Only One Life

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

It was clearly no ordinary drowning. Inspector Louise Rick is immediately called out to Holbraek Fjord when a young immigrant girl is found in the watery depths, a piece of concrete tied around her waist and two mysterious circular patches on the back of her neck. Her name was Samra, and Louise soon learns that her short life was a sad story. Her father had already been charged once with assaulting her and her mother, Sada, who makes it clear that her husband would indeed be capable of killing Samra if she brought dishonor to the family. But she maintains that Samra hadn't done anything dishonorable. Then why was she supposed to be sent back to Jordan? Samra's best friend Dicte thinks it was an honor killing. A few days later Dicte is discovered, bludgeoned to death, and Samra's younger sister has gone missing. Navigating the complex web of family and community ties in Copenhagen's tightly knit ethnic communities, Louise must find this remorseless predator, or predators, before it is too late.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 2, 2012
      In Blaedel’s earnest second police procedural to be published in the U.S. (after 2011’s Call Me Princess), Copenhagen cop Louise Rick looks into the death of 15-year-old Samra al-Abd, a member of the city’s close-knit community of Jordanian immigrants, found in shallow water of a nearby fjord weighed down with concrete. Is this an unfortunate but mundane murder, or an honor killing, a family turning on one of its own? The subsequent fatal bludgeoning of Samra’s best friend, Dicta Møller, confuses the issue. Hostile, judgmental Danish media spotlight Samra’s violent family history as Rick and her colleagues struggle to find the truth behind the two girls’ murders. The novel presents a nuanced and compassionate view of modern Copenhagen’s immigrants, eschewing a simple-minded demonization of outsiders or of the Danes themselves, but the workmanlike prose and flat depiction of the investigation make the story less engaging than it should be.

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