Burned
A Novel
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Uncovering class divisions, racial conflicts, and tangled emotions, this gritty, shocking
novel of suspense heralds the arrival of a major new talent.
Henning Juul is a veteran investigative crime reporter in Oslo, Norway. A horrific fire killed his six-year-old son, cut scars across his face, and ended his marriage, and on his first day back at the job after the terrible tragedy a body is discovered in one of the city’s public parks. A beautiful female college student has been stoned to death and buried up to her neck, her body left bloody and exposed. The brutality of the crime shakes the whole country, but despite his own recent trauma – and the fact that his ex-wife’s new boyfriend is also on the case - Henning is given the assignment. When the victim’s boyfriend, a Pakistani native, is arrested, Henning feels certain the man is innocent. This was not simply a Middle Eastern-style honor killing in the face of adultery – it was a far more complicated gesture, and one that will drag Henning into a darkness he’s never dreamed of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Enger's plodding crime thriller debut, investigative reporter Henning Juul returns to work two years after an unexplained fire killed his six-year-old son and left him with facial scars and an obsession with smoke detectors. When Henning looks into the murder of 23-year-old Henriette Hagerup, who was discovered half-buried and stoned to death with her hand chopped off inside a tent in an Oslo park, he learns the victim was scouting locations for a student film. Suspicion quickly falls on Henriette's Pakistan-born boyfriend, Mahmoud Marhoni, particularly after text messages from her are found on his phone that suggest she was seeing someone else. But the more Henning digs into Henriette's life and her work as a film student, the less he believes the case is an honor killing related to sharia, the Muslim code of conduct. While Henning's tortured psyche intrigues, it's by no means unique in this genre, and he makes a tepid hero at best.
