Today I’m delighted to be joining the paperback blog tour for Son. I’m sharing the review I originally wrote in March 2025 with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Everyone here is lying…

Expert on body language and memory, and consultant to the Oslo Police, psychologist Kari Voss sleepwalks through her days, and, by night, continues the devastating search for her young son, who disappeared on his birthday, seven years earlier.

Still grieving for her dead husband, and trying to pull together the pieces of her life, she is thrust into a shocking local investigation, when two teenage girls are violently murdered in a family summer home in the nearby village of Son.

When a friend of the victims is charged with the barbaric killings, it seems the case is closed, but Kari is not convinced. Using her skills and working on instinct, she conducts her own enquiries, leading her to multiple suspects, including people who knew the dead girls well…

With the help of Chief Constable Ramona Norum, she discovers that no one – including the victims – are what they seem. And that there is a dark secret at the heart of Son village that could have implications not just for her own son’s disappearance, but Kari’s own life, too…

For fans of Harlan Coben, Lars Kepler, Jo Nesbo and Jorn Lier Horst … and The Mentalist.

Review:

I’ve read most books by these authors individually, and loved them all, so imagine my excitement when I discovered that they’d collaborated on the first book in a series! Son had a lot to live up to for me, but oh my, does it do that and then some! The writing in Son is slick, fast paced and full of tension and I found it so hard to put down, especially towards the end!

The protagonist of Son is Kari Voss, who is quite simply a brilliant character. She’s a psychologist, known to the media as “the human lie detector”, as she specialises in body language. As she is not a police officer, she approaches the investigation in this story from a slightly different angle, and this makes the novel really intriguing. Like all the best protagonists, she’s determined, she thinks outside the box and she has an emotional back story of her own that really informs her work.

Son is a small town situated slightly south of Oslo, and the authors capture the small town atmosphere really well. This means that although the police have a suspect for the murders straight away, it’s perhaps not as cut and dried as it first appears, and Johana Gustawsson and Thomas Enger introduce us to lots of other characters who could easily become suspects. I loved delving deeper into their lives, and I really wanted to get to the truth behind the crimes in this story.

This series has so much potential and I can’t wait to see what happens next, especially after the ending that has left me absolutely dumbstruck (and people who know me know that’s not easy!)

Son is available from Amazon.

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