Everyone here is lying… SON by Thomas Enger and Johana Gustawsson #bookreview #Son

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…

❤️❤️❤️❤️.5

Hi and welcome to my review of SON!

When two of your favourite authors decide to join forces and write a book together, you don’t walk, you run, and that is exactly what I did. Of course, my expectations ran too, and we all know that can backfire spectacularly. I’m happy to report I didn’t shoot myself in the foot by expecting too much, SON was everything I’d hoped it would be and I enjoyed it tremendously.

SON marks the start of a new series featuring Kari Voss, who is a sort of mentalist, but in a non-magician kind of way. She is an expert on body language and is known in certain circles as a human lie detector. Kari provides a rather novel and highly fascinating point of view, and a fun police procedural angle, and I loved reading about her. She’s been through hell and back, she dares to question not only others but also herself, and she does so from the heart.

SON is an apt title, as part of the story is set in the town of Son and sons in all shapes and sizes, as well as various parent-son relationships, play a huge role in the narrative. That’s a whole bunch of sons and other characters to keep track of, and plenty of red herrings, but it never got confusing and yes, I did have the right person in my crosshairs all along, thank you very much. That didn’t spoil my fun at all, I was too invested in the investigations, and I was quite wary of some of the other characters as well, hardly anyone was who and what they seemed to be at first.

I noticed the Enger influence, I noticed the Gustawsson influence, but SON is a seamless story and you can’t tell where one author ends and the other begins. I wanted to say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but since they’re both brilliant on their own, let’s just go with: the whole is equally fantastic as its parts.

SON is a thrilling, intricately woven slice of Nordic Noir and it has a delicious sting in the tail that leaves me wanting more, much more. I had a brilliant time with SON and I would happily recommend it to lovers of crime thrillers and police procedurals, and Nordic Noir of course.

SON is out in digital formats and hardcover on 13 March 2025. Preorder it directly from Orenda Books here.

Massive thanks to Orenda Books for the digital review copy. All opinions are my own.