3.5 stars
The Collector is the second book in the series by Danish author, Anne Mette Hancock featuring Kaldan and Scháfer. You don't have to have read the first book but I'd highly recommend it. This one focuses on a missing child, as Kalden and Schafter investigate and become entangled in this chilling mystery. I enjoyed the different viewpoints and characters of Kalden who is a journalist and Schafer who is a detective. While the journalist/police working together trope has been done before, the author manages to make this fresh and the relationship between the characters charming and enjoyable. I felt like the mystery at the heart of the story could have been better wrapped up. While satisfying, it did feel like it came a bit out of left field and rushed. I enjoyed the parts about pareidolia and this phenomena and I'd like the book to have explored this a little more. Overall this was an easy to read suspenseful psychological mystery. It was a decent follow-up but I preferred the first book in the series to this one. I felt like the mystery in that one was more interesting and thought-provoking. I'll keep an eye out for more in this series or others by this author. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Maybe this book just wasn't for me, I found the start a bit slow.

I found the first scene to be interesting, where a child is observed being dropped into the river from a bridge. This got me hooked.

Then, the cut to Heloise Kaldan, an investigative reporter, was where it lost me. The character development, while arguably necessary was slow and meandering, even though it was to do with controversial topics.

Interesting pieces include the confusion of who did or did not see the child, spawning the assignment of a veteran head investigator. To add even more strangeness, the child missing suffers from pareidolia where non-human objects reassemble a face.

Sometimes I found it was too much on the characters and too little on bringing the story together. The contradictions woven throughout, do keep you guessing.

Thanks for the ARC from NetGalley and Penguin Random House!

a very fast and great read, I read it in one sitting and I was happy to do so. great twists and such breath taking events. I liked it very much, couldn't even guess who was behind everything. well written characters and a great story, I can't wait to read the rest of the series.

A gripping read that keeps you guessing until the end. A young boy has gone missing from school and no one knows how he just disappeared. Erik Schafer and his partner Sergeant Lisa Augustin are in charge of the case but there are no clues that they can follow.
Heloise Kaldan has just been put on the story by her newspaper but she would prefer to do the story about soldiers and PSTD. And her bosses want her to use her friendship with the lead detective to get the story. before anyone else. But Heloise knows that Eric just won't give up any leads so she has to snoop to find them. But nothing is at it seems as there are suspects but they all seem to be hiding a secret.
Will they be able to find the boy before it is too late?
A good read not too sure about the title though.
Heloise is a hard lady to dislike she has all these thoughts about not being good enough and that is sad as she deserves to be happy. I hope that she can move forward and learn to love life.
Eric has alot on his shoulders and I think that his wife makes all the difference to him being a good cop and keeping sane at times.
Everyone has secrets some worse than others.
I received an ARC copy from Netgalley & the publisher. This is my voluntary review.

Dark Plotting

If you have not read Nordic mystery thrillers, The Collector can make you a fan. Replete with a large cast of characters, the plot moves along and does not dodge secondary cast.

The first scene sets the stage for a daunting crime. An accidental eyewitness who seems guilty of something, observes a person dropping a child into the river from a bridge. It is shocking.

Hancock cuts to Heloise Kaldan, an investigative reporter, is at her doctor’s office requesting an abortion. The visit is interrupted when the doctor receives a phone call that his son, Lukas, ten years old, did not show up to school. Terribly distraught, the doctor leaves his office and meets his wife at the school. The deep divisions begin, no one really has seen Lukas, or some say he went into the school and then disappeared.

Police are called and the head investigator, a veteran of solving crimes, begins his search for the child. Lukas is described as nice, quiet, blonde, and obedient. He does have a penchant for pareidolia where non-human objects reassemble a face

Other characters of influence are Gerda, best friend of Heloise, who works with those dangerously suffering with PTSD and Martin, Heloise’s boyfriend. Where is Lukas? Was his homelife perfect? Was his sighting an optical illusion?

There was some weak characterization, or maybe too many characters, which may have meant to provide the reader with a bounty of suspects. However, it is a psychological storm of contradictory facts.

My gratitude to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for a pre-published copy to review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Detective Erik Schäfer has returned to wintry Denmark after a trip to St Lucia in the Caribbean. He is already missing the Caribbean, he is seasoned cynical detective who has worked on 600 homicides in his 30 years on the force, an impressive record considering Denmark's relatively low homicide rate (around 50 in a year). This is a very readable Scandinavian noir. A ten-year old boy Lukas has gone missing in plain sight and time is of the essence to find out what happened to him. There are many pieces to the puzzle, the whole story deals with perception and how we see things. The boy was obsessed with pareidolia, where we see faces and things in random objects.

The story is seen from the point of view of Erik Schäfer and his officers and from the viewpoint of Heloise Kaldan, a friend of Schäfer's and an investigative reporter. She is working on a story about PTSD in ex-servicemen, one of whom has a tenuous link to Lukas, she is also working through her personal issues.

This is a solid police procedural, Erik Schafer is methodical with his investigation. He conducts interviews, follows leads, gathers evidence, and looks for links. The characters are relatable. The pacing is good building to a thrilling climax and a haunting final scene. Copenhagen feels more like a small town than a capital city, all the threads intersect a little too conveniently. I would be interested to read more books by this author.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Crooked Lane Press for an electronic copy of this book, and I leave this review voluntarily.

yes it is a 'crime novel from the cold' but it is an above average one. The characters are multi dimensional and well drawn and the story really does surprise at the end and take you there without any useless and predictable twist and turn. I will definitely follow this author and read the other books.

The Collector started out strong and piqued my interest quickly!! And, with lots of great characters involved in the story of the search for the little boy, Lucas, it set itself up for a great read! Lots of mystery surrounding his disappearance and a lot of different scenarios made guessing the ending nearly impossible! Was he kidnapped, murdered, if so, by who? Or did he run away? And, the ending held a lot of unexpected twist and turns!
However, my rating of this book was influenced a lot by the little focus given to the actual synopsis of the book versus all the side stories of the characters. I love good character development but this book just had too much going on which was very loosely tied to the plot at the end. There were also too many unanswered questions at the end of the book for my liking.

You can’t judge a book by its cover; all that glitters is not gold; beauty is only skin deep: these are cliches that warn us that things often are not what they appear to be. As humans, our brains want to make sense of the stimuli sent from our senses; often, this impulse to label our experiences causes us to misinterpret them. This psychological phenomena is called pareidolia. An example of this is face pareidolia where we see faces in random objects (trees, clouds, pop cans, etc.).

In Anne Mette Hancock’s second book featuring journalist Heloise Kaldan, and Erik Schafer from the Copenhagen police unit for violent crimes, ten-year-old Lukas Bierre has gone missing. They learn that he was obsessed with face pareidolia, enough to have an Instagram account dedicated to it. Among his possessions is a photograph of a barndoor that looks like a face. Kaldan, sure that she has seen this barndoor before, begins investigating the location for the article she is writing about the disappearance for her newspaper. Eventually, she chooses to share what she has found with Erik Shafer.

Erik Schafer is methodical with his investigation. He does interviews, follows leads, gathers evidence, and looks for links. He is also a father-figure for Kaldan. Kaldan looks upon Schafer’s marriage as an example of a stabile family, just as they see her as someone needing support.

Pareidolia appears throughout the book in different permutations. First, in the perceptions of potential witnesses: is what they say they see true representations of events? Witnesses say they saw Lukas and his father—Dr. Jens Bierre—that morning at the school, while others state Lukas never arrived.

Second, people who do not fit societal norms: are their behaviors more suspect than those who fit in? Is someone with outward manifestations of a disability combined with little understanding of social norms—like Finn in the book-- more likely to harbor ill-intent?

Third, people carry both physical and emotional hurts, “scars of the heart”: if we look hard enough, can we discern a person’s disease, trauma, or grief? There are people in the book who suffer from PTSD. One is Kaldan, and another is Thomas, a soldier. They seem to function well: but does that mean their existence and perceptions isn’t marred by their illness?

Lastly, there is the type of pareidolia that Heloise Kaldan has: the assumption that the people around her be perfect examples of friends, parents, and professionals. When they do not meet her expectations of what she thinks they should be, she calls them liars; acting as if they are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Her hypocrisy is diametrically opposed to the latter. For example, she keeps secrets, and makes decisions that involve others.
I really enjoyed this book and its precursor, The Corpse Flower. The author presents thought provoking mysteries/psychological thrillers that are well plotted; they pull you in, and keep you guessing. I highly recommend this book.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Crooked Lane Press for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Thanks NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the chance to read Anne Mette Hancock's latest!
I really enjoyed the first book in this series--the duo of Schafer and Kalden is an original type of pairing that I like, and their different areas of expertise help to give the reader a full view of the crime and its aftermath--so I was excited to start The Collector. Here, the urgency of a missing child keeps the tension high, and the twists and turns along the way reveal the danger of misinterpretations. The many characters involved in the child's life and the subplot involving PTSD provide a complex situation for the protagonists to work through, but the end is believable and not easily predicted. Terrific reading!

Thank you, NetGalley!
It had been too long since I read a really good mystery.
The book follows different characters investigating the disappearance of a young boy. A journalist and a detective find themselves having to play with the line between friendship and work. The kid's life depends on following the clues but with every step, everything gets bloodier.
A really good book for fans of mystery. With strong characters that get you from the very beginning. With writing as good as this you get to scream, cry and laugh along with them. As it happened I learned that this was part of a saga, I read it and still followed most of the story. But I'm definitely checking out all of the others. I read I assure you, you won't regret.

When 10 Year old Lukas goes missing the whole Town of Copenhagen is on alert to find the missing boy.
Police investigators all team up to search high and low for clues on his disappearance. Journalist Heloise Kaldan stumbles on some evidence and thinks she recognizes the Barn door in question and Goes off to find the missing piece to Lukas story. There are multiple POVs here; Heloise and her story of emotional detachment, Detective Schafer who runs around leading the case and the various friends and parents that fit into the plot. It was a slow thrilling read, leaving a reader wanting more and looking for this boy t0 be found alive and safe, However it felt like the plot dragged on a lot longer than necessary given the outcome of the plot. It was not much of a plot twist or shock and in the end just fell a bit short. well written, great cover and overall great story but just didn't deliver in the end for me. I just kept thinking it could have been more substantial after vesting so long into 50 chapters!
3.75 stars.

Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this copy in exchange for my hones review.

review also posted on Instagram: lattesbooksandblankets

I read this book in one sitting and loved it ALL. Scandinavian crime fiction is a genre I really enjoy and this one has a police investigation with a great male character intersecting with a female journalist. I have not read this author before but her first book in this series is on my list for immediate consumption.
This book is well written, but I can tell it probably loses something in translation as some of the language used is quite stilted. Oh, if I could only read Danish! I want to go back and get the backstory on our lead characters as they seem like real people with interesting stories. I think I’ll appreciate them more when I know a little more about their motivations. They don’t seem as fleshed out as other thrillers I’ve enjoyed lately.
The mystery in this novel was a good one. I usually can figure out the criminal right away, but I didn’t in this case, and I love that! The author had me going in many different directions but not the ultimate one until the bitter end.
Fans of Camilla Lackberg and Jo Nesbo will love this one. It’s dark but not lights out. The topic of a missing child is a tough one for any mother like me to read and probably is why I had to finish it before I could sleep. The ending is satisfying but it seemed to be resolved a bit too quickly for me.
Thanks to Crooked Lane Books and Net Galley for the introduction to a new author and for an early review copy.

OMG!!! a what a good book! Twists and turns through the end of the book. A 10 year old boy disappears from school. Everyone remembers seeing his father drop him off, but no one remembers seeing him after that. Step by step the police follow every clue until the case is finally solved, but wait, did they miss something??

When a boy goes missing, detective Erik Schäfer and his partner Lisa Augustin are called in to investigate. They are both with the Violent Crimes Unit, Copenhagen Police.

Detective Erik Schäfer and his wife Connie have just come back from a five-week vacation in Saint Lucia 🇱🇨 when he learns from his partner that a ten-year-old named Lukas Bjerre has disappeared from his school.

When Heloise Kaldan a reporter with the Demokratisk Dagblad paper learns from her friend Gerda Bendix, a military psychologist that a kid had gone missing from his school she heads to the school to do some investigative reporting.

Earlier Heloise had met with the father of the missing kid, Jens Bjerre who’s a doctor, to get an abortion.

The boy’s jacket and some other school belongings are later recovered in the moat at the Citadel.

When Heloise's boss Karen Aagaard the editor-in-chief gets wind of the news about the boy’s disappearance, she asks Heloise to cover the Lukas Bjerre case.

Soon after bodies turn up: first a former patient of Gerda who was in the military ( they found his blood on Lukas’s jacket). How did his blood get on Lukas’s jacket? It’s up to the police to determine the boy’s whereabouts—if he’s still alive—and bring him back to his parents.

Heloise has been dating a man Martin and lately, she’s been having second thoughts about him. Their relationship takes a sour turn when Martin learns about the abortion just when he’s about to propose to Heloise.

Highly recommend this thriller. Perfect for fans of Jo Nesbo

Thank you to Anne Mette Hancock, NetGalley, and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC of this book.

(3.5 stars)
The Collector is Danish noir crime fiction that sits at the crux of police investigation and investigative journalism. The two lead characters, Schäfer (the detective) and Heloise Kaldan (the journalist) have both conflicting interests and a firm friendship, that leads to a complicated relationship which is nicely told in this book (despite it being the second in an ongoing series) though the course of them investigating the disappearance of 10-year-old Lukas.

In direct contrast to the lats crime fiction novel I read (The Falcon by Isabella Maldonado) the connectivity between the books is handled well, with much more subtlety. The author, Anne Mette Hancock, hints about the characters' history in the first part of the novel, and expands a bit more in the latter part, without it feeling too much like an advertisement for her first novel, The Corpse Flower.

By and large I liked this novel and felt it moved along at a decent pace that made me enthusiastic about reading more. Sometimes I found the expression a bit cheesy and disrespectful, for example: "Word of the boy's disappearance would spread soon enough, like lice at a Girl Scout camp, and the school's parents would work themselves up into a foaming frenzy." It detracted from the cold and ominous atmosphere Hancock had created to think of a pack of onlookers "eyes agleam with anticipation at the prospect of death porn." I also think we can do better at describing the way key events change our internal perspective on life than "it feels kinda like an internal 9/11". If you need three lines to explain your analogy, it isn't a good one.

I found the contempt for the food critic's "gastro-masturbation" a bit hard to swallow, but of course recognise the trope of a privileged white male critic who is a "self-righteous snob who nursed a latent hatred of anything that might appeal to the proletariat" recognisable even from an Australian perspective. Perhaps if the author had a less contemptuous view of food writers, she may not have used terrible descriptions like "[T]he woman's expression imploded, like a failed soufflé." Kaldan's analysis of this character's fate later in the book undid some of the character development that had made her likeable to me. Despite Kaldan being quite functional in the first half of the book, she falls back into the well-worn trope of damaged female lead protagonists who can't form appropriate relationships in the latter half of the novel.

Nordic noir is usually intelligent and socially critical, so it was a surprise to encounter so much stigma in this book. At one point a building is described as "occupied by a stew of various tormented souls, petty criminal bums, addicts, immigrants, and young college students who couldn't afford to live in downtown Copenhagen." I also wasn't particularly enamoured with the handling of domestic violence in this novel as it simply reinforced stereotypes by justifying violence as deserved, particularly when done by character who should have encountered this sort of crime before and thus at least be conflicted.

This is one for those who like Camilla Lackburg, Lars Kepler, Jo Nesbo, etc. Quite a dark story with twists and turns you don't see coming. An excellent read for those who love a good Nordic crime thriller. I haven't read the first in the series but will definitely be reading it in the near future. Schaffer is an character I would like to follow
#TheCollector#NetGalley

**Spoiler Allert**
Well, I just finished "The Collector" by Anne Mette Hancock and followed her characters Heloise Kaldan and Erik Schafer through the finding of Lukas Bjerre after he was missing from school. It was fun finding his father had waved to someone else instead of Lukas, this was discussed with Schafer and his present partner Lisa Augustin after the case was closed. At the time Kaldan was working through her relationship with Martin Duvall, since she had found out she was pregnant and didn't want any children. Heloise friend Gerda, was having an affair with another trama psychologist and coworker, so Kaldan didn't like it since she was already married. Gerda use to work with Schafer and did so on this case. They had found blood on Lukas's jacket which was found in a pond by the school and found the person who's blood it was dead. Anne Mette uses red herrings with each and every person. She uses one in the very end of her story when Schafer realizes Lukas mom might not live. Her story was very good to read.

I am a big fan of Scandi Noir and this didn’t disappoint!
A really fast paced and thrilling story about a missing 10 year old boy, this well written and original story kept me reading until late into the night.
Gripping stuff!
An easy 4 star worthy read.

This book was a slooooow burn. All of the action really took place in the last thirty pages. I'm wondering if reading the first book in the series would have given me better context for the characters, but I don't feel like it was essential to this plot line.

Was hoping for a little more personality from our main character --- she seemed pretty passive for an investigative journalist. But overall, well-written and an entertaining crime drama.