The Mountain King
A Novel
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4.6 • 15 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This atmospheric and sinister mystery will have you “hooked from the very first page” (Kyle Mills, #1 New York Times bestselling author) as it follows a brilliant female detective investigating the darkest side of humanity.
Detective Leonore Asker seems to have the leading position at Malmö’s Major Crime Division within reach. But things go awry when, in the middle of a high profile kidnapping case, management relegates her to the so-called Department of Lost Souls—the unit for odd, cold cases banished to the basement of the police station.
Despite the humiliation, Asker is drawn into one of the more peculiar cases. Someone is secretly placing small ominous figures in a huge model train displays and one of the figures seems to represent the missing woman from the kidnapping case. As Asker’s investigation leads her into the world of the abandoned and forgotten, she reaches out to her old friend and urban explorer Martin Hill. Together they discover that an unusual kind of evil lurks—at the heart of a mountain, deep down in the darkness.
“Absorbing, deftly plotted, bone-chilling” (Andrew Gross, New York Times bestselling author), The Mountain King will twist its way under your skin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This superb Scandinavian noir from de la Motte (Deeds of Autumn) opens with the disappearance of Smilla Holst and Malik Mansur, a college-age couple with a penchant for exploring abandoned buildings in southern Sweden. Leonore Asker, head of the Serious Crime Command in Skåne, is on the case—at least until national bigwig detective Jonas Hellman arrives from Stockholm to assist her. The two have history: they carried on an affair that ended when Asker reported Hellman for misconduct. After Hellman arrives in Skåne, he schemes to have Asker moved off of the case. She's swiftly demoted to manage a team of "HR nightmares" in the Resources Unit—better-known by her colleagues as "the Department of Orphaned Cases and Lost Souls"—and discovers that her new colleagues have been working on a seemingly trivial vandalism case involving an extraordinarily detailed model railroad in the nearby locality of Hässelholm. As the plot slowly unfolds, that vandalism becomes key to discovering what happened to the missing college students, and to uncovering several other crimes carried out by a figure who calls himself the Mountain King. De la Motte nimbly juggles a substantial cast as his plot grows increasingly intricate, ratcheting suspense to near-unbearable heights. This crackerjack page-turner will keep readers up late.
