DEATH OF A NIGHTINGALE is Released

Nina. Natasha. Olga. Three women united by one terrifying secret. But only one of them has killed to keep it.

Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian woman who has been arrested for murdering her Danish fiancé, escapes police custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen's police headquarters. It isn't the first time Natasha has lost a partner to violent ends: her first husband was also murdered, three years earlier in Kiev, and in the same manner, viciously tortured and his hands broken. At the same time, someone tries to abduct Natasha's eight-year-old daughter from the Red Cross center that has been caring for her while her mother, an illegal immigrant, was in jail.

Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has been following Natasha's case for several years now, since Natasha first took refuge at a crisis center where Nina works. Nina, who had tried to help Natasha leave her abusive Danish fiancé more than once, just can't see the young Ukrainian mother as a vicious killer. The kind of violence involved in both deaths requires great strength, something the waifish Natasha lacks. But in her effort to protect Natasha's daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she didn't know about this woman and her past. The mystery has long and bloody roots, going back to a terrible famine that devastated Stalinist Ukraine in 1934 when a ten-year-old girl with the voice of a nightingale sang her family into shallow graves.

This haunting, ingeniously plotted thriller demonstrates that the sins of modern Europe-racism, human trafficking, and thuggish paramilitary-run organized crime-have evolved out of the failed ideas of Europe's past.

And that mothers are capable of anything when it comes to their children.

To post a comment, you must register and login.