I tend to have very girdy loins when it comes to dark and twisted fiction, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that The Forgotten Girls was a little too disturbing for me.TW/CW: discussions of sexual abuse and rape. 

The seventh book in the Louise Rick series can be read as a stand alone and centers around a Danish investigator (Louise Rick) who heads up a Missing Persons Deptartment. When the body of a woman is found in a forest, it’s up to Louise to identify her, and what she finds is troubling. The woman, and her twin sister, were both wards of the state and lived in an institution for the mentally handicapped. They were declared dead when they were still children, but clearly that’s not the case. Louise is now determined to find out what happened to the woman, and the sister, who she worries might still be alive and in distress.

The mystery is sound, and the plotting pacing is technically superb. Also this is the most “readable” Scandinavian noir book I’ve read yet (I often find them a bit dry). The issue was I found the topic of sexual abusive of the mentally and physically disabled so upsetting that I left the book feeling worse than when I started it. I’ll check out Blaedel’s other titles and hope they leave me less disheartened.

– Elyse

n a forest in Denmark, a ranger discovers the fresh corpse of an unidentified woman. A large scar on one side of her face should make the identification easy, but nobody has reported her missing. After four days, Louise Rick—the new commander of the Missing Persons Department—is still without answers. But when she releases a photo to the media, an older woman phones to say that she recognizes the woman as Lisemette, a child she once cared for in the state mental institution many years ago. Lisemette, like the other children in the institution, was abandoned by her family and branded a “forgotten girl.”

But Louise soon discovers something more disturbing: Lisemette had a twin, and both girls were issued death certificates over 30 years ago. As the investigation brings Louise closer to her childhood home, she uncovers more crimes that were committed—and hidden—n the forest, and finds a terrible link to her own past that has been carefully concealed.