Book Review: THE ICE BENEATH HER by Camilla Grebe

Title: THE ICE BENEATH HER

Author: Camilla Grebe
Read: March 2019

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Book Description (Goodreads):

Winter’s chill has descended on Stockholm as police arrive at the scene of a shocking murder. An unidentified woman lies beheaded in a posh suburban home—a brutal crime made all the more disturbing by its uncanny resemblance to an unsolved killing ten years earlier. But this time there’s a suspect: the charismatic and controversial chain-store CEO Jesper Orre, who owns the home but is nowhere to be found.

To homicide detectives Peter Lindgren and Manfred Olsson, nothing about the suave, high-profile businessman—including a playboy reputation and rumors of financial misdeeds—suggests he conceals the dark heart and twisted mind of a cold-blooded killer. In search of a motive, Lindgren and Olsson turn to the brilliant criminal profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön. Once a valued police asset, now marooned in unhappy retirement and a crumbling marriage, she’s eager to exercise her keen skills again—and offer the detectives a window into the secret soul of Jesper Orre.

But they’re not the only ones searching. Two months before, Emma Bohman, a young clerk at Orre’s company, chanced to meet the charming chief executive, and romance swiftly bloomed. Almost as quickly as the passionate affair ignited, it was over when Orre inexplicably disappeared. One staggering misfortune after another followed, leaving Emma certain that her runaway lover was to blame and transforming her confusion and heartbreak into anger.

Now, pursuing the same mysterious man for different reasons, Emma and the police are destined to cross paths in a chilling dance of obsession, vengeance, madness, and love gone hellishly wrong. 

My musings:

I really love a slow, character driven psychological thriller that focuses on the human mind, which is what attracted me immediately to Camilla Grebe’s writing when I picked up SOME KIND OF PEACE earlier in the year. Since then, I have been eager to read more of her books, and am happy to report that I liked this one equally as much!

THE ICE BENEATH HER starts with a gruesome murder, like any good Scandinavian thriller should ;) A beheaded woman is found in the home prominent Stockholm businessman Jesper Orre. Her identity is unknown, and the homeowner is nowhere to be found. What makes it even more puzzling is that the murder bears an uncanny resemblance to another killing ten years ago, which has never been solved. Could these two murders be related? But what could possibly link the two victims? Without a motive and a suspect who has vanished off the face of the earth, homicide detectives are at a loss of where to start.

Grebe tells her story through three different POVs: there is homicide detective Peter Lindgren, who is a somewhat tormented soul with a bad track record of ill-fated relationships; criminal profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage and an illness-enforced early retirement; and Emma Bohman, a store clerk whose romance with the murder suspect Jesper Orre has gone terribly wrong. As Peter and Hanne work together in the present to solve the murder, we first meet Emma in the weeks leading up to the killing, in which she tells her personal story. What unfolds is a simply brilliant story of love, madness and the dark corners of the human psyche.

With an uncanny insight into what makes people tick, and not afraid to showcase a bunch of flawed but enigmatic characters, Grebe has delivered an irresistible and compelling mystery that immediately drew me in and kept me interested to the end. I found myself drawn to each character equally, which is a difficult balance to achieve, but Grebe managed to bring so much backstory to her characters by just including snippets of memories and reflection that they all seemed like flesh and blood people to me. Each one of the three main players appears wounded and vulnerable in some way, which immediately made me warm to them despite their failings.

The mystery unravelled slowly, and each time a layer was peeled away, there was a new revelation that brought a new depth to the story, like a stack of intricately painted Russian dolls. And when you get right to the last one – BAM! Here it was, the totally unexpected. I loved it! There are a lot of thrillers out there, and it’s difficult to find one that totally surprises me, but Grebe not only pulled it off but also made me question my own sanity by the end of it, as I was coming up with wild and wonderful theories as to how this would all come together. And come together it did – beautifully.

I am happy to see that there are two more books to come in this series, as I was so taken by these characters that I would love to see what happens to them from here. There’s nothing better than discovering a book you love and finding out it’s the start of a series. If you love Scandinavian crime fiction as much as I do, then I urge you to give this one a go!