Review 2209: We Shall Be Monsters

If you are interested in reading this book, you will understand it much better—and there is a warning to that effect in the book—if you read the two books that came before it.

At the end of Blood Floe, retired Constable David Maratse’s friend and lover, Sergeant Petra Jensen, was kidnapped. Now the body of a teenager is found naked, his back embedded with fishing hooks with colored threads attached. Not far away, next to an ice-fishing hole, are Petra’s clothes and a suicide note.

Maratse knows that the use of her Greenlandic name in the signature is a message to him that she did not commit suicide. He arranges a funeral for her so that the authorities won’t realize that he plans to go off on his own to find her—and that’s what he does.

While Maratse is following leads and other police investigate the boy’s murder, there are glimpses of what is happening to Petra. Tensions rise when her captor tells her she will soon be set free, as the readers know that for him setting free means killing.

I was drawn to this series because of its glimpses into life in Greenland, but except for Maratse dressing in white and taking a sled dog team, there wasn’t anything particular to Greenland in this one. It’s a fairly standard thriller.

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Review 2073: Blood Floe

Blood Floe is the second book in Christoffer Petersen’s Greenland Crime Series featuring David Maratse, a former police constable who was invalided out of service. Although Maratse keeps telling people he’s retired, he seems to attract trouble.

Maratse has taken his sledge out to train a new sled dog when he comes across the Ophelia, an ice-strengthened yacht that was carrying an expedition team. He sees blood at the gangplank, so he goes on board and finds five people, all either dead or wounded. He also sees signs that they have been drugged.

When the police begin investigating, they find that a sixth expedition member, Dieter Müller, is missing. Dieter is an expert on a 1930’s explorer, Alfred Wegener, and he is searching for a journal believed to be left in a remote cabin. Dieter has found the cabin and the journal.

Soon Maratse is contacted by a wealthy businessman, Mr. Berndt. The expedition was his, but he is more interested in finding the journal than in what befell his team and wants to hire Maratse to find it. Maratse says he’s retired but soon finds Berndt’s stepdaughter in his home assuming he will help.

Meanwhile Maratse’s friend Petra, a police sergeant, has been taken aside and told why finding the journal is so important.

Blood Floe is another interesting mystery with a fair amount of action. I like it best for the glimpses of Greenland life, in this case, sledding and narwhal hunting.

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Review 2028: Seven Graves One Winter

Before winter in the small Greenland village of Inussuk, the gravediggers dig seven graves and hope that will be enough. One is about to be filled when a man throws a young woman overboard a boat and then runs over her.

Constable David Maratse is nearly ready to be released from the hospital, where he has been recuperating from torture. He has been given early retirement because of his injuries and plans to retire in Inussuk. Once there, though, he and his friend Karl pull up the body of a young woman while fishing.

It’s pretty obvious who she is. First Minister Nivi Winthur’s daughter Tinka has gone missing. It soon seems clear that the murder was political. Although Nivi’s opponent in the coming election, Malik Uutaaq, is running on a platform of Greenland for Greenlanders, not Danes, he prefers his sex partners to be half Danish and very young. Tinka was the most recent. But would Malik actually murder her?

When Nivi meets Maratse, she asks him to help find her daughter’s killer.

Although after two revealing conversations, I didn’t find it hard to guess the murderer, I liked this novel for other reasons, mostly its exotic setting and descriptions of life in Greenland. (How many mysteries have sled dogs in them?) It is described as Arctic Noir on the cover, but except for the crime and the suspenseful ending, it was more of a cozy mystery.

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