I enjoyed the characters, the dialog and the timing but felt the plot left me unsatisfied.

Hoping I enjoy the next Engberg more.

This novel is set in Copenhagen and starts with a brutal murder: A young student is killed in the flat she shared with another girl. The murder seems to be connected to the elderly woman who owns the house and lives upstairs, or rather to something she wrote. Jeppe Kørner and Anette Werner, two very different characters, are assigned to the case, but there is no trace of the killer and they are at a loss.
Although the murder is a bit too brutal for my reading tastes, I loved everything else about this novel: The characters, the style, the composition. I could not stop reading and it simply never got boring, but not in a cheap, page-turner type of excitement. I really cared about the story. The only thing I criticize is that in the end, things became a bit too far-fetched in my opinion, and I would have wished for a simpler solution.
The Copenhagen setting is well done, too, I loved the descriptions of the city and the mentioning of streets and places, but it did not overshadow the plot or feel artificial.
I highly recommend this novel and will definitely continue with this series. ( )

An elderly gentleman, living in a small boarding house in Copenhagen, notices the back door to ‘the girls’ apartment is open. He steps in, calling to them to make sure everything is all right. Instead, he trips over Julie’s mutilated body, falls into it and suffers a heart attack.

The unlikely detective team of Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner (apparently their names rhyme in Danish) are assigned to the case. They regard each other with suspicion as Jeppe is returning to duty after a long bout of depression and addiction to pain killers. Anette is in a stable relationship; she is the opposite and a foil to Jeppe.

In an odd twist, the landlady of the house, Esther de Laurenti, aspires to be a mystery writer. Her novel features a young protagonist whom she has openly based on Julie. However, Julie’s gruesome murder also mirrors the murder in Esther’s manuscript which she has only shared with a very small writers group of two other people.

A second, unforgettably dramatically staged murder of a man known to all the tenants occurs, increasing the heat on the detective pair.

I enjoyed the detective work, and the back stories of the detective team. Although their stories didn’t affect the events of the mystery itself, I recognize that they are being introduced as the centers of this series.

Not quite as ‘Nordic noir’ as some of the other Nordic mysteries that I have read, the two murders are gruesome and do give an overall darkness to the story.

I would definitely continue with this series, based mostly on my interest in the two detectives. ( )

My Rating: 3.5/5

A young woman, Julie Stender, is brutally murdered in her apartment in downtown Copenhagen with her face mutilated and all signs pointing to the fact that she probably knew her murderer. Police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner are assigned to the case. In the course of their investigation, they interview Julie’s landlady Esther de Laurenti, who is in the middle of is writing a novel with the main character based on Julie, who seems to have shared some significant details of her life with Esther. What is shocking is the fact that the details of Julie’s murder are uncannily similar to events described in Esther’s manuscript- a manuscript shared with only a few others in a private writers’ group. With Esther ruled out as a suspect, it is up to the detectives to take a deep dive into Julie’s life – her dysfunctional family, her roommate and current friends, and her complicated love life, past and present, complete with a mysterious boyfriend whose identity is yet unknown as well as the members in Esther’s writing group to find any possible connections. Subsequently, when another person close to both Esther and Julie is murdered, Esther begins to fear for her own life, Korner and Werner must race to find the murderer before someone else turns up dead.

To be fair, even though The Tenant by Katrine Engberg is not exactly the gritty Nordic noir I expected it to be, it is an interesting procedural crime thriller with two lead detectives out to solve a gruesome murder. This is a slow-paced novel that does require a bit of patience. I did enjoy the twists and red herrings and was not able to predict the identity of the perpetrator which was a plus for me. I am a fan of police procedurals in general and enjoyed the dynamic between the lead detectives who work well together with their fair share of good-natured bickering in-between. We don’t get to know much about Anette Werner outside her professional life unlike Jeppe Korner and his struggle with prescription pain medication and his navigating his newly divorced single status being described with so much detail (maybe a bit too much?). I felt that the details of his personal life were of no consequence to the plot and found my interest wavering in those segments.

I had to alternate between reading and listening to the audio on account of my watery eyes and flu-addled brain being unable to focus on reading for too long. The audio narration by Graeme Malcolm was quite engaging. I feel the audio experience was more satisfying than reading the book.

Overall, I was drawn to the premise of this novel and though the execution wasn’t quite as impressive, I'm not ready to give up on the series altogether and fully intend to read the remaining books.

Audiobook:4/5
Plot:3/5 ( )

I enjoyed the detectives and the pacing but I found the conclusion too tidy. ( )