Cover image of "Invisible Murder," a novel about murder most foul

Red Cross nurse Nina Borg is a do-gooder who can’t say no regardless of the consequences to her marriage or her two children’s well-being. The older child, a fourteen-year-old girl, has consigned Nina to “Mom Hell. The place reserved for bad mothers, career women, alcoholics, and mentally unstable women where they might suffer for all eternity because they had dared to reproduce despite a complete absence of maternal qualifications.” In The Boy in the Suitcase, Nina found her life in danger, and her family relationships in jeopardy, when she agreed to an old friend’s panic-stricken request to pick up a suitcase from Copenhagen’s central train station. Invisible Murder, the sequel to that outstanding debut, promises to pose equally daunting challenges when Nina agrees to visit an old garage where dozens of illegal Roma (Gypsy) immigrants are holed up. And that leads pell-mell into an inquiry into murder most foul.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Shifting perspective, and an important new character

Invisible Murder opens in northern Hungary where two teenage Roma boys have broken into the hospital on an abandoned and boarded-up Russian military base. The boys are searching for weapons they can sell in hopes of helping their families to survive. Then, from their perspective, they hit the jackpot — and that, of course, leads to trouble. Big trouble. One of the boys’ older brother, a half-brother, really, named Sándor, takes it upon himself to rescue his little brother from the danger he’s involved himself in.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, we meet an inspector in the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, PET, with the unfortunate name of Søren Kierkegard. His name is spelled a little differently from that of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, so we can’t expect him to be a descendant. Nor is he much of a philosopher. However, he is a competent if unimaginative detective. As the story unfolds, his life and Sándor’s intersect with that of our heroine, Nina Borg, in a complex and suspenseful tale that holds surprises from beginning to end.


Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis ★★★★★


Murder most foul

As the book’s title intimates, the murder mystery at the center of this engrossing story involves an unconventional crime, one that, if anything, is even more foul than the usual. The authors have done a terrific job researching the scientific hook on which the novel hangs. They’ve delved even more deeply into the conditions of life among the Roma in both Hungary and Denmark, and they paint a convincing if troubling picture of the right-wing mania that has put a racist regime in power in Hungary.

About the authors

Lene Kaaberbøl is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels and children’s books. Her partner in crime, a fellow Dane, is former journalist Agnete Friis. Together, the two have authored four novels to date in the bestselling Nina Borg series. They were among four Scandinavian crime writers who sat on a panel I moderated at the 2016 Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. Kaaberbøl has been a full-time novelist for some time. The success of the Nina Borg series has allowed Friis to become a full-time writer as well.

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