Ella Nygaard has been a ward of the state since she was 7 years old, the night her father murdered her mother. She doesn't remember anything about that night but the panic attacks she suffers incapacitate her for days. When Ella is admitted to a psych ward, her son, Alex, is placed with a foster family. In desperation, Ella kidnaps Alex and flees to the seaside town in Denmark where she was born - and is forced to confront her childhood demons.
Ella Nygaard, 27, has been a ward of the state since she was seven years old, the night her father murdered her mother. She doesn't remember anything about that night or her childhood before it-but her body remembers. The PTSD-induced panic attacks she now suffers incapacitate her for hours-sometimes days-at a time and leave her physically and psychically drained. After one particularly bad episode lands Ella in a psych ward, she discovers her son, Alex, has been taken from her by the state and placed with a foster family. Driven by desperation, Ella kidnaps Alex and flees to the seaside town in northern Denmark where she was born. Her grandmother's abandoned house is in grave disrepair, but she can live there for free until she can figure out how to convince social services that despite everything, she is the best parent for her child. But being back in the small town forces Ella to confront the demons of her childhood-the monsters her memory has tried so hard to obscure. What really happened that night her mother died? Was her grandmother right-was Ella's father unjustly convicted? What other secrets were her parents hiding from each other? If Ella can start to remember, maybe her scars will begin to heal-or maybe the truth will put her in even greater danger.
On her way home from the shops, Nina Borg is attacked. Dazed and half-conscious, she hears her assailant ask for her forgiveness. Only later does she understand that this isn't for what he's just done, but for what he plans to do to. For the first time, she's the primary target of a hit, and it slowly dawns on her that this case is connected to a surprising and dangerous friendship among three young men from Manila.
Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has dedicated her life to helping Copenhagen's most desperate: illegal immigrants, abused women, and others underserved by society. But Nina's do-gooder complex often takes her into dangerous situations and communities beyond the margins of the law's protection.
Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg, the compulsive do-gooder, has meddled in one life too many, and her good deeds are coming back to haunt her. She is attacked in a parking lot on her way home from a grocery trip, her skull cracked. As her loved ones wait for her to regain consciousness, a story unfolds about three young men in Manila and the secret one of them is desperate to hide.
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, 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. But in her effort to protect Natasha’s daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she doesn’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.
“In the third book of this Scandinavian crime series Red Cross nurse Nina Borg is once again involved in the lives of Eastern European immigrants living in Denmark…Fans of the duo’s previous books will not be disappointed. The authors maintain similar tension and mood as in their earlier books, and Nina Borg remains determined to protect those whom others might see as outcasts from society.”—Library Journal
In the ruins of an abandoned Soviet military hospital in northern Hungary, two impoverished Roma boys are scavenging for old supplies or weapons they could sell on the black market when they find more than they ever anticipated. The resulting chain of events threatens to blow the lives of a frightening number of people into bits and pieces. In this feverishly anticipated follow-up to 2011's critically acclaimed The Boy in the Suitcase, Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg doesn't realize she is putting life and family on the line when she tries to treat a group of sick Hungarian gypsies who are living illegally in a Copenhagen garage. Nina has unwittingly thrown herself into a deadly nest of the unscrupulous and the desperate, and what is at stake is much more terrifying than anyone had realized.
Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is trying to live a quiet life. The last thing her husband wants is for her to go running off on another dangerous mission to help illegal refugees. But when Nina's estranged friend Karin leaves Nina a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station and begs her to take care of its contents, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous case yet. Because inside the suitcase is a three-year-old boy: naked and drugged, but alive. Nina's natural instinct is to rescue the boy, but she knows the situation is risky. Is the boy a victim of child trafficking? Can he be turned over to authorities, or will they only return him to whoever sold him? In an increasingly desperate trek across Denmark, Nina tries to figure out who the boy is, where he belongs, and who exactly is hunting him down. When Karin is discovered brutally murdered, Nina realizes that her life and the boy's are in jeopardy, too.
