Monday Book Recs--Death iof a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

If you are not reading this series (beginning with The Boy in the Suitcase), you are really missing out on the best female-centered crime fiction I've ever read. I liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but had some seriously problems with the author's wish fulfillment fantasies about women having sex with the middle-aged male detective in the story. And also the graphic depiction of sex crimes. The Nina Borg series has some hard stuff, I will admit, but I don't think it's gratuitous, and I so love Nina as the main character. SO MUCH LOVE!

Nina Borg is a nurse who works with the illegal immigrant population of Denmark. Yup, Americans, every country in the world has to deal with this problem. And guess what? The Danes deal with it in some ways as badly as we do. Nina ends up in the middle of a bunch of deportation proceedings with the most innocent victims who don't speak Danish and struggle to get their story heard. But in the meanwhile, she messes up her own personal life. She is the person who has to save everyone and she does it, but at great cost to herself and to her own husband and kids.

In Nightingale, she ends up facing a lot of nasty consequences and she takes a good, hard look at herself, realizing that she needs to make some better choices. We as readers also get to know more of her backstory, what causes her OCD behavior about time, and why she so desperately needs to save people. It is so perfect for her character and I am trying hard not to spoil it for you readers out there.

I so loved how this is a story about women. It's about Nina and her own children, and how she tries to become a mother to Rina, a Ukrainian girl whose mother is in jail. It is the story about Rina's mother and her quest to get her daughter back. And it is also a story about two sisters back in 1935 in Ukraine, during the beginning of the Soviet Union and the twists and turns there will keep you guessing to the very end. So many tricky mother-daughter relationships, and sister-sister relationships. And the ending is perfectly crafted so that the women are the ones who are the actors, though there are also men involved.

Dark relationship and crime perfection.