Julie Stender is found murdered, very theatrically, in her apartment by an unsuspecting, elderly neighbor. Although nothing like this has ever happened in her building, and she has no idea as to why it would, their landlord, Esther de Laurenti, quickly becomes a prime suspect.

Questions are raised all around as to who had it out for Julie and Esther, and in their investigation, the detectives, Anette and Jeppe, learn that Ms. de Laurenti is a budding author, who has an unpublished manuscript of her newest novel online.. a novel that is completely parallel in actions to the murder of her tenant..

There are many possible suspects introduced as you continue reading, and it keeps you guessing the whole time. There are many elements involved in this mystery that make you want to keep going until you get the answers!

I really enjoyed reading this one, and I like the premise and originality of Katrine Engberg's story! Thank you to NetGalley, the Author, and Gallery/Scout Press.

Looks like I've found a new Nordic Noir style author to add to my list of favorites. I see the author has two more books in Danish, and can't wait until they are translated! This was a good mystery/thriller, and kept me engrossed in the story right up until the end.

If you are a fan of cop dramas, or murder mysteries, this book is for you. Set in Copenhagen, detectives unravel the mystery surrounding the murder of a young woman. There are plenty of twists to unravel and the author’s descriptive style allows you to immerse yourself in the story. Even Copenhagen itself felt like a true part of the story.

I really wanted to like this book. As a fan of other Nordic crime dramas (TV and print) such as: The Killing, The Chestnut Man, and Dicte, I was hoping a suspenseful story with intriguing characters. This one had neither. The premise was unusual, but the pacing of the story was slow and choppy. I didn't care about the characters and the writing was odd. I assume something was lost in translation.

Some sample quotes:
"And since the joint was just a loogie away..."
"Their shoe soles stuck to the clingy linoleum flooring making their footsteps sound like a symphony of agitated plungers" (Okay, that one was funny.)
"...Clausen exhaled audibly through his nose so that a hair that had escaped the trimmer flapped in the breeze."
"Larsen turned on his heel and marched away in a cloud of rage and expensive aftershave."
"He didn't seem like he could care less"
"Tell me, are we in the middle of some fucking crime novel, or what?"

If you are a die-hard fan of Nordic crime, and have exhausted the other, finer options, this one will do. It just isn't the best.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

I had heard so much about The Tenant on Instagram and various book blogs. I was very much looking forward to reading it. I read about 50 pages and decided I would not continue reading it. I am tired of books that depict violence against women and this book is especially gruesome. I keep hoping publishers will tire of using this theme of violence against women as the central focus of books, but apparently that is not the case. I'm hoping in the future publishers will recognize violence against women isn't the only way to tell a story.

Good thriller with plenty of twists and turns. I enjoyed it. I received a complimentary copy from NetGalley and the publisher and this is my honest opinion.

This was a well written mystery/ thriller that kept me hooked through every page. It’s a book that i would definitely recommend to friends that enjoy a good suspense book with some great twist and turns along the way.

Esther de Laurenti, retired from her work teaching at a university, is enjoying her life. She owns a building with several tenants and even a coffee shop on the ground floor. She hosts dinner parties with artists, she’s even started writing a crime novel. But when one of her young tenants, a young woman named Julie Stender, is murdered, with elaborate cuts across her face, Esther is stunned.

Recently divorced Jeppe Korner, Copenhagen police detective, is chosen to lead the investigation, along with his partner Anette Werner. As they look into the crime, finding suspects, looking into the lives of Julie and her roommate, logging evidence, Korner and Werner discover that solving this murder will be more difficult than they first thought.

When the main suspect turns up murdered as well, and the crime seems to be following the crime novel Esther had been writing, the clues seem to lead the police in several different directions. It’s only with meticulous fact-checking and attention to details that they figure out who really did kill Julie. But did they figure it out in time to save the next victim, or will there be another body on their hands?

The Tenant is the first of Katerine Enberg’s bestselling novels to break into the American market, and I hope there are more. This twisted mystery is quote a ride through ups and downs as you try to put the pieces together, only to find yourself scratching your head when it all falls apart again. The detectives Korner and Werner were fully human, facing the darkness of the case with frustration, concentration, lust, hope, despair, alcohol, coffee, and junk food.

I was fascinated by The Tenant. I don’t get a chance to read many books about Denmark, so this was fun in a mini-vacation sort of way. I thought the crime was especially well plotted, with lots of red herrings to twist my thinking and make me change my theory of the crime over and over. But mostly I really loved the characters, especially the police, and how they interacted with each other and with their witnesses and suspects. I can’t wait to see what Katerine Enberg brings us next!

Galleys for The Tenant were provided by allery, Pocket Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.

When Gregers tumbles into the apartment of the young women downstairs he’s puzzled at the open door and then shocked when he encounters the body of Julie, one of the tenants. Assigned to the case are Jeppe Korner and Annette Werner, two detectives from the Copenhagen squad.

Their investigation starts with the owner of the building, Esther di Laurenti, who has been writing a novel which strangely has a murder in her story which is clearly what happened to Julie. The detectives work to find out who all had access to the work in progress. Was it Esther’s houseguest, Kristoffer, who had a crush on Julie or was it someone from her writing group?

The detectives are following up on leads that take them throughout Copenhagen, which for me, was one of the reasons why I wanted to read the book having been there several years ago. I enjoyed reading details about some of the areas.

Korner and Werner are a mismatched pair, but I liked their dynamic even if Korner spent a good part of the book being sad about his wife leaving him and yet quickly falling into an entanglement with an attractive woman. The mystery is not very fast-paced but I think you really get to know the characters and their quirks. I could see myself reading another book featuring these two detectives.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for sending me a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

You know how everyone has their own, individual reading tastes? How some people love enemies-to-lovers while others despise it? Well, I have an admission to make.

I’m 37 years old and I have no firm grasp on my reading preferences. I mean, I know that I tend to prefer fantasy to contemporary, but, beyond that, I’m honestly still learning my tastes. In a way, this is a good thing because it causes me to pick up books without a previous bias. But then there’s always the possibility that I’ll read something that just doesn’t jive with me because it’s not to my tastes.

I think that’s what happened with The Tenant. It’s a murder mystery, it has detectives and focuses heavily on the process of solving a crime, and I have found that books like that are just… not my thing. This just happened to be the book that fully cemented this fact in my mind. I will say, however, that I don’t think that this was the sole reason that this book didn’t work for me.

The Tenant follows two detectives, Jeppe and Anette, who are assigned to investigate the murder of a young woman at an apartment complex in Copenhagen. During the course of the investigation, they discover that murder mirrors a scene in an unpublished novel that the young woman’s landlord, Esther, is writing. As the investigation unfolds, the twists and turns just get weirder and more melodramatic.

And therein lay one of my issues with this book. It was just so over-the-top at times! And the characters were weirdly self-aware of the drama, too. At one point, one of the characters literally says “Tell me, are we in the middle of some f*cking crime novel, or what?” and I just… cringed. I understand that some drama is necessary or else why would anyone read it? It was just a bit much and it felt like things were piling up without anything being resolved.

My other issue with this book was the fact that the “who” part of “whodunit” was completely obvious as soon as the character was introduced. I’ve guessed the ending of mystery novels before and still managed to enjoy the journey, but that was not the case with this one. The character is introduced, I thought “Welp, it was definitely this person”, and then I spent the rest of the book wishing it would get to the point. I was just so bored and it didn’t help that every. single. character. was completely dull. They were like caricatures of your typical, street-wise detective who is down-on-their-luck. Especially Jeppe. Uggggh, Jeppe! There were several instances where I wrote in my notebook “Get your sh*t together, Jeppe!” and, honestly, he never does.

My last issue with this book was some of the writing. It was just… odd. For instance, our hot-mess detective, Jeppe, has to interview a woman that he finds attractive and, I quote, he “feels a ripple in his scrotum”.

…What?

There’s more instances of this and it completely took me out of the story. Mostly because I had to put my iPad down, find my husband, and tell him about whatever silly line I had just read. There are also a lot of instances of slightly misogynistic writing. For example, Jeppe is texting the woman that made his scrotum ripple and makes the observation that she doesn’t use “emoticons or hard to decode statements” and goes on to observe how “amazingly unwomanlike” he finds it. I mean, perhaps the author is just trying to write an unlikable protagonist, but I did not care for it.

The longer I write this, the more I feel like bumping my rating down…

However, I will say that I did enjoy the plot of the story. Though I didn’t care for the entire execution, there were genuinely good bits of this book that hooked me into the story. Unfortunately, I had to read through all that other stuff to get to them. Still… it was compelling at times and I was surprised by one aspect of the ending. So… there’s that, I guess?

Final thoughts: Though the concept was super interesting, the execution was pretty boring. The characters were flat and the writing was just weird at points. There were good bits near the end, but this definitely cemented the fact that detective novels just aren’t for me.

I was excited to read this book but got confused early on. The way it is written was hard to follow. I loved the premise of this book but just couldn’t get into it as much as I wanted too.

When searching for a great mystery novel to read, I typically don’t pick up stories that follow the detective’s perspective. I decided to give it a whirl with The Tenant and I am glad that I did! With mega twists and turns, the chaos that ensues throughout the storyline is sure to draw the attention of a crime lover.

The Tenant begins with the discovery of a gruesome murder, the poor Julie Stender. We are quickly introduced to Jeppe and his team, who begin to slowly unravel the truth behind this horrific crime. Something interesting has tied the case to Ester de Laurenti, Julie’s landlady and aspiring author. The murder mystery that Laurenti had been writing has appeared to come to life, with Julie’s murder. Jeppe and his team race against the clock to find the killer before someone else gets hurt.

In the beginning of the story, I found it to be a bit slow-paced. But, as many novels do, the introduction to these vital characters is important to have at the forefront, so I slowly trudged through those chapters. Despite the story having a slower start for me, it began to pick up pace quickly as the detectives began to uncover the details of the crime. I would highly recommend this to anyone who loves a good murder mystery that mainly focuses on the detective and the steps it takes for him to solve the mystery!

Review: An extremely well-written mystery that will leave you guessing as to whodunnit. A girl is found dead by her neighbor and before you know it, her roommate is also killed. Esther, the landlord and a tenant herself of the same building the girls lived in, is the common thread between the girls and yet another murder that takes place elsewhere. Esther's companion, Kristofer, who is more like a son to Esther than anything, is also found dead.

As detectives Jeppe and Anette work to unravel the mystery behind this lot of dead people, more and more characters are introduced into the story. This book has many great twists in it where the reader will think the mystery has been solved. Too bad the real ending is not as good as any of the twists in the plot. It kind of lands in a dull spot and the reader is left saying, "So that was it?". Definitely a great read but the ending does not really have too much shock value.

Thank you to Netgalley, Katrine Engberg, and Bookouture for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Mystery/thriller that draws you in from the very beginning and keeps you guessing until the very end. Twists and turns keep you on the edge of your seat. Well done!

First off, let me tell you that a mystery that includes a team of two very different detectives, has me hooked. Anette Werner and Jeppe Korner are two Copenhagen police detectives who are very different, and they use their dissimilarities well in solving a crime which begins with a brutal murder. As the story unfolds or maybe I should say unravels as they try to connect the dots between several murders. I look forward to more mysteries from Engburg.

It took me a long time to get into this one. A long, long time. I kept picking up the book, reading, putting it down, and reading other things.

This weekend, I finally got past page 30 and eventually got into it.

It's a good, basic police procedural/murder mystery. There wasn't anything super special about it or about the characters.

I was actually kind of disappointed because I expected more from the Danish setting. While there were smattering bits of culture and history, the murder could have been plunked down in any largish city without changing much of anything. I just wanted to fully immerse myself in the setting and couldn't.

An okay read.

One morning Gregers Hermansen is taking his trash out when he notices the door to his neighbor’s apartment is open. As he enters their home he literally stumbles over one of the girls that lives there. In this Danish detective series, detectives Korner and Werner are assigned to investigate the case. The two of them dislike so many of the small things that make each person who they are, but somehow they are led to believe that they complement each other even if they don’t quite understand what that means. As they investigate all the tenants of the house, they begin to learn of secrets, manipulation and unfinished books that ares eerily similar to parts of the murder.

I’ll be honest I went into the story worrying a bit about the police procedural setup. I wasn’t against having two detectives not liking each other, but I was worried that it would be cliche that somehow they would find that inner friendship and become best buddies at the end. One of my main concerns would be that their dislike would be superficial and would be easy to overcome. Instead, I loved how it was all the different idiosyncrasies of each person and those quirks that make us who we are that really drive them crazy.

The book is set in Copenhagen and part of the fun of reading is getting almost a tour of the city and I loved getting a chance to look things up on the Internet – from the underwater statues, Agnete and the Merman, to the Knippelsbro bridge – a bascule bridge that was first built in the 1600s, although the current version was built in the 1930s. But we also get to learn about other Danish traditions, such as gaekkebrev, a traditional Easter paper cuttings.

Overall, I liked the idea of the story and it’s characters. I also think the translator did a terrific job. However, there was at times a lack of cohesion and implausibility to the mystery/thriller part of the story. Part of me is also torn on the ending and its setup. There seemed to be a lot of moving parts that left me a little confused, and the whole premise of why everything happened made me think it was a bit “much.”

Rating: 3.5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and Gallery, Pocket Books for the advanced reader copy and opportunity to provide an honest review.

A twisty thriller that you won't want to put down!!

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

The premise of The Tenant by Katrine Engberg drew me in immediately, as it sounded exactly like the dark and twisty stories I love, with a gruesome murder, people with secrets, and a flawed but honest detective. Those elements were all present, but this one just wasn’t a big hit for me. It felt like there were really great ideas in it, but they got kind of lost beneath explorations of the lead detectives less than stellar personal life, and way too many weird asides about his penis. I know more about his penis than I ever needed to know about anyone’s.

I still consider this a 3-star read, because the good parts were so good, and so well written. I also took into consideration that the issue might not be the writing/story, but the translation. Sometimes things just get lost or just don’t translate well. The parts of the book focusing on the murder(s)/investigation were really amazing; the other sections just didn’t seem necessary to me.

I received a free e-copy of The Tenant from NetGalley and Gallery in exchange for my review.

When a young woman is found brutally murdered, Copenhagen investigators Jeppe and Anette are surprised to find a writer whose unfinished book mirrors the crime. In pursuing all leads the police are led into a dark and twisted plot.

Do you like Nordic noir or police procedurals? The Tenant had me hooked from the first chapters! Jeppe and Anette are an interesting team each with their own strengths. It took me a bit to warm up to Jeppe and I hope the next installment gives us more on Anette. This was a dark read with layers of lies. The book kept me guessing. The Tenant makes a good winter read. Thank you to Gallery books, Scout Press and Netgalley for an ecopy of this book in exchange for my honest review.