"You're a journalist and he's a policeman. Oil and water," the Copenhagen Police Department's Detective Sergeant Erik Schäfer tells Heloise Kaldan--his explanation for why she's not getting any information out of a cop. And yet Kaldan and Schäfer make a remarkably simpatico crime-fighting duo, having joined forces in The Corpse Flower, The Collector, and now Ruthless; Melissa Lucas translates this third novel in Anne Mette Hancock's top-shelf series.
Kaldan has long seen Schäfer as a father figure, and now she also finds herself gravitating toward Jan Fischhof, a 60-something cancer sufferer; she intends to write a profile on the hospice that's seeing him through his last days. During one visit, Fischhof seems to want to get something off his chest, although his dementia makes him hard to understand. After he becomes agitated when Kaldan mentions his adult daughter, she has Schäfer search for a name that Fischhof uttered. What Schäfer unearths brings Kaldan to Southern Jutland, where a case concerning one missing teenage girl soon becomes two. Ruthless concludes with a twist that only a clairvoyant would see coming.
As ever, Hancock is as attuned to Kaldan and Schäfer's personal lives as she is to the crimes they're investigating. While Kaldan gets reacquainted with an old lover in Southern Jutland, Schäfer frets about the toll his advancing years may be taking on his marriage and professional life. As Kaldan and Schäfer work together, albeit geographically apart, Ruthless becomes a portrait of friendship, loyalty, and other qualities contrary to the title of this impression-making novel. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer