Sara Blaedel | THE DROWNED GIRL

Plot (via Goodreads):

It's clearly no ordinary drowning. When a young girl is pulled from the watery depths, a piece of concrete tied around her waist and two mysterious circular patches on the back of her neck, Detective Louise Rick is immediately called out to Holbraek Fjord.
Her name was Samra, and Louise soon learns that her short life was a difficult one, as part of Copenhagen's sizeable Muslim immigrant community. Samra's father had already been charged once with assaulting her, and her mother is sure he would be capable of killing anyone who brought dishonor to the family. Yet Samra, she insists, had done nothing dishonorable. So was her death really an honor killing, or something even more sinister?
Navigating the complex web of family and community ties in Copenhagen's tightly knit ethnic communities, Louise must hunt a killer before he strikes again...
Thriller master Sara Blaedel is in top form as Louise takes on what may be her most important--and deadly--case yet.

Review:

The Louise Rick series is by far one of my favorite book series that I’ve been able to enjoy. What I love most about Sara Blædel’s writing is that this series starts off strong and continuously gets better with each novel. Not only is each story more complex and tightly wound than the previous one, but as a reader you get the pleasure of witnessing Louise Rick and Camilla Lind grow in their personal lives but also struggle and excel in their careers. 

The Drowned Girl is the novel that after reading the synopsis, I was initially hesitant on how this story would play off. What I was thrown into was an immersive and darkly constructed novel that was both harrowing and mysterious. Not only do Louise and Camilla shine at their best in this tale, but the secondary characters are top notch. They are sympathetic, unapologetic, and brilliantly written. 

Initially in this story, it took me a little longer to get into this one compared to the other novels I’ve read in this series but as the story progressed I found myself in a spiderweb of information and secrets that completely took me by surprise and kept me hypnotized with every word. I thought that with a novel like this, Blædel was sensitive and informative with cultural appropriation featuring a storyline that was as much informative as it was built on mystery and suspense - none of which can be easy to accomplish with a that combination. I loved how much I learned from this novel about Muslim culture and was still heavily invested in this story...all the way down to the shocking and harrowing finale that only Blaedel herself could pull off.

Special thanks to Grand Central Publishing for this copy in exchange for my honest review.

Rating: 4/5