The Arc of the Swallow - Tapa blanda

"Sissel-Jo Gazan has demonstrated that her acclaimed mystery The Dinosaur Feather was no fluke . . . The author has an uncanny knack for quickly drawing a reader into the minds of her characters: suffering their frustrations, laughing at their jokes, worrying during their crises. The domestic intrigues of Marie and her relatives, and of Soren and Anna, prove as engrossing as the criminal conspiracies at hand. Gradually, this excellent book's separate storylines draw tight, and Soren's knitting-backwards proves not so different after all from the scientific method."
--The Wall Street Journal

"[Gazan's] follow-up foray into the contentious world of health-care research is a smart and compelling thriller. Two well-developed and nicely integrated mystery plots and a set of lifelike characters make this a high-end thriller for readers of Jo Nesbø and of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener."--Booklist (Starred Review)

"Gazan's excellent sequel to The Dinosaur Feather draws the reader into the fiercely competitive, high-stakes world of medical research . . . Gazan skillfully introduces characters and cleverly resolves side stories as the action builds to a thrilling denouement."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"A fast-paced story line involving the World Health Organization, the Nobel Prize committee, and the cutthroat world of academia. From Denmark to West Africa, Gazan takes readers on a roller-coaster ride . . . Less graphic than Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy but just as compelling, Gazan's novel breathes fresh life into the packed Scandinavian mystery genre."
--Library Journal

"An amazingly suspenseful scientific thriller . . . You will be entertained, provoked, and educated along the way. One of the best [crime novels] I have read."
--Julia Lahme, Femina (Denmark)

"Gazan once again demonstrates the careful composition and genre skill that is needed to create a crime novel with more to offer . . . It has taken her five years to get there, and she scores highly on all the components that an entertaining and challenging crime novel should contain."
--Politiken (Denmark)

"The author writes elegantly and with obvious warm insight into her fellow human beings. A family chronicle that evolves into a scientific thriller, and it goes down like ice cream on a hot summer's day."
--Antennen (Denmark)

Praise for The Dinosaur Feather
"My best mystery of the year turns out to be yet another stunner from Scandinavia. I could be wrong (but I don't think I am) when I say that Gazan disposes of a murder victim here by an infernal means that no other mystery writer--not even the resourceful Dame Agatha--ever concocted."
--Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"A formidable mystery . . . Gazan keeps up the pace as she shifts the focus from one painfully dysfunctional family to another, until even the secrets of Søren's childhood are exposed. Among the latest crop of Scandinavian thriller writers, Gazan combines the broad scope of Jo Nesbø with the ability to focus as closely and remorselessly as Karin Fossum."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Formidable and satisfying . . . in the author's menacing world, sins of emotional cowardice and betrayal can be just as awful as offenses against the criminal code."
--Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal (selected as a top-ten mystery of the year)

"this excellent book's separate storylines draw tight" --The Wall Street Journal
"Gazan skillfully introduces characters and cleverly resolves side stories as the action builds to a thrilling denouement" --Publishers Weekly, starred review
Maverick investigator Søren Marhauge returns in a high-stakes case that reveals a profit-motivated conspiracy with roots that extend all the way from the upper reaches of Big Pharma to the national government.
When controversial Professor Kristian Storm is found hanged in his office, his assistant Marie Skov refuses to believe that he has committed suicide. The late scientist had uncovered a shocking truth involving immunology programs in the developing world during a recent research trip to West Africa. Marie believes he was silenced before he could share what he had learned.
With help from the unlikely source of a Nobel Prize-winning rival of Storm's, former police detective Søren Marhauge takes the case, determined to prove what really happened to the professor.
Interwoven with the fast-moving investigation are moving portraits of Skov's troubled family and Marhauge's complicated relationship with his girlfriend, another biologist. Marhauge once again battles his own demons as he pursues a cabal determined to protect its secrets at any cost.