Cry Wolf

Welcome to my showcase of Cry Wolf which is been hosted by Harlequin Trade Publishing, 

CRY WOLF

Author: Hans Rosenfeldt

ISBN: 9781335425713

Publication Date: December 28, 2021

Publisher: Hanover Square Press

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Book Summary: The first standalone Swedish crime novel by Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of the TV series The Bridge as well as Netflix’s Emmy-winning Marcella. A dead wolf. A drug deal gone wrong. A female assassin of rarely seen skill. Hannah Wester, a policewoman in the remote northern town of Haparanda, finds herself on the precipice of chaos. When human remains are found in the stomach of a dead wolf, Hannah knows that this summer won’t be like any other. The remains are linked to a bloody drug deal across the border in Finland. But how did the victim end up in the woods outside of Haparanda? And where have the drugs and money gone? Hannah and her colleagues leave no stone unturned. But time is scarce and they aren’t the only ones looking. When the secretive and deadly Katja shows up, unexpected and brutal events start to pile up. In just a few days, life in Haparanda is turned upside down. Not least for Hannah, who is finally forced to confront her own past.

Everything had gone according to plan. First their arrival. Be the first in place, park the jeep and black Mercedes be-side each other on a rutted clearing in the middle of the forest, used by lumber trucks and harvesters for loading and U-turns, then position the coolers to face the narrow forest road they’d just come down. The ruts beneath them, the nocturnal birdsong around them, the only thing besides absolute silence until the sound of engines announced the arrival of the Finns. A Volvo XC90, also black, drove up. Vadim watched as Artjom and Michail took their weapons and left the Mercedes, while he and Ljuba climbed out of their jeep. He liked Ljuba, thought she liked him, too. They’d gone out for a beer together a few times, and when they asked her who she wanted to drive with, she’d chosen him. For a moment he considered telling her to wait in the car, take cover, say he had a premonition this might go wrong. But if he did that, what would they do afterwards? Run away together? Live happily ever after? That would be impossible once she knew what had happened. She’d never betray Valerij; she didn’t like him that much, he was sure of it. So he said nothing. The Volvo stopped a few meters in front of them, the engine switched off, the doors opened and four men stepped out. All of them armed. Looked around suspiciously as they fanned out. Everything was still. The calm before the storm. The Finnish leader, a large man with a buzz cut and a tribal tattoo wrapped around one eye, nodded to the smallest of the four Finns, who holstered his gun, walked behind the Volvo and opened the trunk. Vadim also backed up a few steps to un-lock his jeep’s trunk. So far everything was going according to their plan. Time for his plan. A bullet from a rifle with a silencer on it entered just beneath the eye of the large Finn closest to the car. The sudden explosion of bone, blood, and brain matter as the projectile made its way through the back of his head made the others react instinctively. Everyone started shooting at the same time. Everyone except Vadim, who threw himself behind the shelter of the jeep. The man with the tattoo on his face roared loudly, hugged his trigger, and immediately took down Michail with four or five shots to the chest. Artyom answered with gunfire. The tattooed man was hit by two bullets, staggered back, but re-gained his balance and turned his weapon on Artyom, who threw himself behind the cover of the Mercedes, but it was too late. Several bullets hit his legs from the hip down. Shrieking in pain, he landed on dry gravel. The tattooed man continued bleeding, roaring, and shooting as he moved toward the Volvo, determined to make it out of here alive. But a second later he fell to his knees gurgling, let go of his weapon and pressed his hands to what was left of his neck. Somewhere more shots were fired, more screams could be heard. Artjom slid up into a sitting position, while trying to stop the blood that gushed from his thigh in the same rhythm as his racing heartbeat. Then another series of shots, and he went still, his gaze turning from desperation to emptiness, his lips forming some soundless word before his head slumped onto his chest. The third Finn had thrown himself into the cover of a shallow ditch with a good view beneath the parked cars. A round of concentrated fire from his semi-automatic had hit Artjom in the back. Vadim realized that he, too, must be visible and flung himself around the jeep to hide behind one of its large wheels. When he got to the side of the car, he saw the smallest of the four Finns lying dead on the ground. Ljuba wasn’t visible. Another round of shots sounded from the ditch at the forest edge and bullets hit the metal on the back of the wheel, puncturing the tire. One went through the rubber and hit him in the side, just above his butt. The pain was a white-hot flash through his body. He closed his eyes, swallowed a scream, leaned his forehead against his knees and made himself as small as he could. As he slowly let the air in his lungs out again, he realized the gunfire had ceased. It was silent. Completely silent. No movement, no voices, no roar of pain or betrayal, no bird-song, nothing. As if the very place itself were holding its breath. He peeked out carefully from behind the jeep. Still silent. And still. Slowly, slowly he raised his head for a better view. The sun hung below the trees, but still above the horizon; the scene in front of him was bathed in that particular soft, warm light of the midnight sun. He rose cautiously to his feet. A bullet was still lodged in his muscle and tissue, but it didn’t seem to have damaged any vital organs. He pressed his hand to the wound. Blood, but no more than he could stop with a compress. “Ljuba?” Ljuba was leaning against the rear bumper of the Finn’s car, breathing shallowly, the front of her gray T-shirt beneath her jacket soaked in blood, the gun still in her right hand. Vadim assessed the damage. The blood was running out at a steady rate, so it hadn’t nicked an artery. No air bubbles, so her lungs were probably intact. She might very well survive. “Who shot us?” she asked, out of breath, grabbing Vadim’s jacket with a bloody hand. “Who the fuck started shooting?” “He’s with us.” “What? What do you mean with us? Who is he?” “Come on.” He gently took the gun away from her, pushed it into his pocket before standing up, leaned forward and helped her to her feet. She grimaced from the pain of exertion but managed to stand. With his arm around her waist and her arm around his shoulders, they walked out into the open area between the cars. When they reached the rise where the tattooed Finn had fallen, Vadim stopped, gently removed Ljuba’s arm, released his supportive grip from around her waist, and backed away with two large steps. “I’m sorry…” Ljuba’s gaze was uncomprehending at first, but she soon realized what was happening, why he’d brought her here. Seconds later a bullet pierced her temple and she was thrown to the ground. Vadim pressed his hand to the wound on his lower back and stretched, let out a deep sigh. In the end, everything had gone according to plan. Excerpted from Cry Wolf by Hans Rosenfeldt, Copyright © 2022 by Hans Rosenfeldt. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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Author Bio: 

Hans Rosenfeldt is a Swedish screenwriter, radio presenter, novelist and actor. He created the Scandinavian series The Bridge, which is broadcast in more than 170 countries, as well as the ITV/Netflix series Marcella

Women of Pearl Island by Polly Crosby

 Welcome to my shoe case for Women of Pearl Island by Polly Crosby which is been hosted by HarperCollins

THE WOMEN OF PEARL ISLAND

Author: Polly Crosby

ISBN: 9780778311140

Publication Date: December 7, 2021

Publisher: Park Row Books

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Book Summary:

With the same atmosphere and

imagination of THE BOOK OF

HIDDEN WONDERS,

Polly Crosby’s new novel,

THE WOMEN OF PEARL ISLAND

is set on a lush, secluded island

where family secrets bring together

an unlikely friendship.

On a secluded island off the British coast,

an elderly woman named Marianne

collects butterflies and memories

from her past. No longer able to catch

butterflies

herself, she enlists the help of a

young woman named Tartelin who

has peculiar

birthmark on her cheek. Tartelin’s

mother has recently passed, leaving her

unmoored and eager for new

beginnings on the island.

Marianne has spent most of her life

on the island, her family having owned it

for generations. She begins to tell

her young assistant her family’s story –

from the prosperous days when they

harvested pearls and held banquets,

to the harder times and her father’s desperate

money-making schemes. But during WWII, the British government

commandeered the island for nuclear testing and they were all forced to leave.

Though, secret to everyone, Marianne stayed behind and experienced something

she calls “the blast,” an event that changed everything for her. Now, the older woman

is obsessed with tracking the changes in butterflies and other creatures on the island

to prove what she witnessed so many decades before. With a mystery spanning decades, this is an emotional and atmospheric

story of a young woman coming into her own as she forges an unlikely

friendship with her employer, both women grieving their pasts and together,

embracing a new future.

ONE Tartelin Summer 2018 “I do not require diaper changing, I do not require spoon-feeding, I do not require my ego massaging. What I do require is someone with a deft pair of hands. I asked for someone with experience in dealing with little things, delicate things. A scientist, perhaps. Is that you?” I nod. “Show me your hands, then, child.” I hold them out, palm side downward, and she wheels herself over and inspects them. Her own hands, I see now, have a tremor. “You’re a pretty girl,” she says, her eyes drifting over my face, glancing off my cheek, and I feel my skin redden. “Not very robust, though. Are you sure this is the right job for you?” I open my mouth to speak, but she cuts me off. “What did you do, before you came here? How is it that you are suited to this vacancy?” I frown. We went over all this in our letters, back and forth, back and forth. Written on paper, not sent by email, each one signed Miss Marianne Stourbridge in her regimented, barbed-wire scrawl. My life back home was the reason she chose me. But then, she is old, and she can’t be expected to remember everything. “I grew up around my mother’s artwork, helping her out in her studio,” I say, more loudly than I mean to. “And then I went to art school myself. Mum’s work was focused on found objects, making art from bits of nature...feathers, leaves and twigs—” “Lepidoptera aren’t ‘bits of nature,’ Miss Brown.” “She also made sculptures out of grains of rice in her spare time. I helped her.” “Why on earth would anyone do that?” She leaves the ques-tion hanging in the air and turns her chair abruptly, wheeling herself back to her desk. The chair is made from cane. It looks like an antique, and I’m surprised it still works. It must be exhausting to propel. “It’s a shame you don’t have a scientific background, but now you’re here, you’ll have to do. Here, hold this.” She lifts a pair of gold tweezers into the air and I hasten forward and take them. “No, not like that. Pinch. Gently. That’s it.” I adjust my hold and feel how the spring of the tines is like an extension of my fingers, and I’m back with my mother and she’s saying, “Careful, Tartelin, don’t squeeze too hard. Feather barbs bruise easily.” But before I can use this new-found body part, the tweezers are whisked away from me, and she’s turning again to the desk and bending over her work. I stand by her side and wait, wondering if I’m allowed to go. The clock on the mantel chimes loudly. I count eight. I look at my watch. It’s ten past two. Miss Stourbridge? Shall I adjust your clock?” “No point. It’ll only go back to eight o’clock.” I look over at it, frowning. The second hand is juddering in jerky movements. It makes me dizzy to look at it, as if it’s mea-suring a different kind of time. I turn back to my employer. Miss Stourbridge is so still as she works. I can see her teas-ing the body of a dead moth from a cocoon, her fingers mov-ing infinitesimally slowly. I look around the room. It is lined in dark panels of wood, and every surface has frames and frames of butterflies and moths, glinting pins plunged into husked bodies. “Did you catch all these butterflies?” She is silent, and at first I think she hasn’t heard me. But then I see she’s holding her breath so as not to disturb the moth’s delicate wings. I watch closely, the clock ticking behind us. I’m looking not at her work but at her ribs, waiting for them to inflate, waiting for her nostrils to swell, anything that shows air is passing into her chest. My eyes sting from the pain of staring. She is so still that she has become a part of the chair she sits in. Only her finger and thumb move ach-ingly slowly, and the minutes tick by. When I was young, I used to try to be as still as she is now. My mother would sit me on her knee and tell me stories, and I would hold myself as still as a statue, bewitched by her tales. “Long ago,” she always began, in a voice that was reserved only for when the moon was rising, “I was a tiny jellied spawn no bigger than a pearl, floating in the earth’s great oceans. The fish nibbled and swallowed my brothers and sisters up, snap, snap, snap, and I was left, coming at last to rest on the pebbled shore of a beach. And that is how I came to have these,” she would say, waving her hands in front of my face, so close that they skimmed my eyelashes and all I could see was the thin layer of webbed skin between each finger. To my unprejudiced four-year-old eyes, the webs were not a deformity: they were beautiful, useful, magical, and I wished with all my heart that I could be like her, could be from the sea. I take my eyes from the poor moth on the desk and look over Miss Stourbridge’s head to the picture window that frames the sea beyond, and I remember anew that the sea surrounds us here, like a comforting arm holding the world at bay. A feeling of calm settles over me. However strange this woman is, whatever my job might entail, it was the right decision to come here, I can feel it. I had seen the advertisement in one of Mum’s ornithologi-cal magazines. Mum bought them for the photographs. She particularly liked the close-ups of the birds’ eyes and feathers. The magazines were littered throughout our house, spattered with drops of paint, pages ripped out and twisted together into the vague forms of gulls and robins so that every surface was covered in paper birds made of paper birds. But the latest magazine had landed on the doormat, pris-tine and untouched, and when I shook it from its clear plastic covering, it had fallen open on the ad. PA required to assist lepidopterist. Must be able to start immedi-ately. Must not be squeamish. When I had written to ask for more information, the return address had intrigued me. Dogger Bank House, Dohhalund. Dohhalund. An unusual word, not English-sounding at all. A bit of research showed me that it was a tiny island off the East Anglian coast, the long thin shape of it reminiscent of a fish leaping out of the water. Its heritage was a mixture of English and Dutch. When I looked at it on a map on my phone, it had seemed so small that I imagined you could walk its circumference in only a few hours. I had tried to picture what kind of an island it would be: a cold, hard rock grizzled with the droppings of thousands of seabirds, or a flat stretch of white sand,

waiting for my footprints? Whatever it turned out to be, the isolation of it appealed to me. Miss Stourbridge’s letters had been vague about the posi-tion she was offering, but she did tell me, rather proudly, that the island had belonged to her family for hundreds of years. While I wait, I look about the room, searching for photo-graphs, evidence of other people. Where is her family now? I shift my weight carefully from foot to foot and I glance at my watch. Two twenty-three. Thirteen minutes. I wonder if I’m being paid to stand and do nothing. I look around the room. Next to the desk is a large clear glass box. Inside hang rows and rows of cocoons of all different shapes and sizes. One or two are twitching. I turn away with a sting of shame, feel-ing somehow as if I’ve looked at something I shouldn’t have. Over by the window, there is a huge black telescope on a stand. Unlike everything else in this place, it looks very mod-ern. Next to it on the windowsill sits a battered pair of bin-oculars on a worn leather strap. Quietly I back toward the chaise longue in the corner and lower myself onto its tattered silk cover. It’s the first time I’ve sat down in hours, and my body sings with relief. I edge my hand into my pocket and pull out my phone. It’s switched off: the battery ran low somewhere off the coast of Norfolk at around the same time that the signal disappeared. The lack of signal hadn’t worried me: I’d been looking forward to charg-ing my phone when I arrived, tapping in Miss Stourbridge’s Wi-Fi code, the friendly glow of my phone’s screen a com-fort in this new place. I look around for an outlet in the room, and with a sudden slick shiver I find I can’t see any. There must be electricity here, surely. But if not... Realization runs through me like a thrill: if there’s no electricity in this house, there won’t be any Wi-Fi either. And with no signal, there’s no way of contacting the outside world. No way for the outside world to contact me. The roar of the sea appears to amplify through I take my eyes from the poor moth on the desk and look over Miss Stourbridge’s head to the picture window that frames the sea beyond, and I remember anew that the sea surrounds us here, like a comforting arm holding the world at bay. A feeling of calm settles over me. However strange this woman is, whatever my job might entail, it was the right de-cision to come here, I can feel it. I had seen the advertisement in one of Mum’s ornithologi-cal magazines. Mum bought them for the photographs. She particularly liked the close-ups of the birds’ eyes and feathers. The magazines were littered throughout our house, spattered with drops of paint, pages ripped out and twisted together into the vague forms of gulls and robins so that every surface was covered in paper birds made of paper birds. But the latest magazine had landed on the doormat, pris-tine and untouched, and when I shook it from its clear plastic covering, it had fallen open on the ad. PA required to assist lepidopterist. Must be able to start immedi-ately. Must not be squeamish. When I had written to ask for more information, the return address had intrigued me. Dogger Bank House, Dohhalund. Dohhalund. An unusual word, not English-sounding at all. A bit of research showed me that it was a tiny island off the East Anglian coast, the long thin shape of it reminiscent of a fish leaping out of the water. Its heritage was a mixture of English and Dutch. When I looked at it on a map on my phone, it had seemed so small that I imagined you could walk its circumference in only a few hours. I had tried to picture what kind of an island it would be: a cold, hard rock

grizzled with the droppings of thousands of seabirds, or a flat stretch of white sand, waiting for my footprints? Whatever it turned out to be, the isolation of it appealed to me. Excerpted from The Women of Pearl Island by Polly Crosby, Copyright © 2021 by Polly Crosby. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

Social Links:

Author Website

Twitter: @WriterPolly

Instagram: @ polly_crosby

Facebook: @pollycrosbyauthor 

Goodreads

Author Bio: Polly Crosby grew up on the Suffolk coast, and now lives deep in the Norfolk countryside. THE BOOK OF HIDDEN WONDERS was awarded runner up in the Bridport Prize's Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a First Novel, and Polly also won Curtis Brown Creative's Yesterday Scholarship, which enabled her to finish the novel. She currently holds the Annabel Abbs Scholarship at the University of East Anglia, where she is studying part time for an MA in Creative Writing. THE WOMEN OF PEARL ISLAND is her second novel.