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Femicide

By: Pascal Engman, Michael Gallagher - translator, Legend Press
Narrated by: Sofia Engstrand
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Summary

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. But they couldn’t have been more wrong.

When a 25-year-old woman is found dead in Stockholm, detective Vanessa Frank knows that there is more to the case than meets the eye. And when Vanessa finds herself on the trail of a dangerous internet community who call themselves "incels", her world starts to unravel.

These ‘involuntarily celibate’ men have fostered hatred towards the women who turn them down, and now women are turning up dead. But can Vanessa prove the connection, and is she ready to risk her life to do so?

Femicide is a heart-pounding scandi-noir from the Swedish writer Pascal Engman, that scours the dark side of the internet in a thriller that feels all too real. For fans of Jo Nesbo or Stieg Larsson, this is an absolute must-read from the next generation of crime writing.

Pascal Engman (1986) is a Swedish crime writer and former journalist. Pushed by his exposure to extremist views on social media, Pascal has become known for writing about the darkest reaches of the internet and the people behind the screen.

His Vanessa Frank detective series has achieved critical acclaim within the scandi-noir scene and includes works such as The Widows, Cocaine, and Femicide.

©2022 SAGA Egmont (P)2022 SAGA Egmont
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Critic reviews

It is one of the best Swedish crime novels I’ve read in years... impossible to put down.

-- Camilla Läckberg, author of the Fjällbacka and Faye series, with more than 26 million copies sold worldwide

Fresh, brilliant writing and utterly compelling. I loved it.

-- Peter James, UK No.1 bestselling author of the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series

He never lets go of the reader’s desire to know just how the hell this is going to go.

-- Fredrik Backman, best-selling author of A Man Called Ove

There is an incredible drive in [Pascal Engman’s] prose, and a wonderful sense of dramaturgy. With a light hand he throws you into his dramas. It is irresistible reading.

-- David Lagercrantz, author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web - Millennium series by Stieg Larsson

[Pascal Engman] has an amazing ability to constantly accelerate the pace of the story. He absorbs the reader so you can’t stop reading.

-- Inga-Lill Mosander, Swedish journalist

What listeners say about Femicide

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Entertaining and gritty thriller

Enjoyed the character development and interconnecting plotlines. However, the story took a long time to gain momentum towards it's tense and terrifying climax. I almost stopped listening 4 hours in as it alternated too much between very noir and violent to the mundane, and needed some more suspense earlier on to keep you invested. However, I'm glad I persevered as was satisfying when the different arcs began to weave together. Overall narrator's voice was nice to listen to, especially with her perfect pronunciation of Swedish names and places. In more heightened dialogue, she could have sounded less fearful like when the female detective is shouting orders. Sometimes felt a bit child like and would have more impact just to read it without trying to inject breathy emotion into passages describing intense action or desperation.
I recommend for a long journey through the rain!

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A Cold Read

As a huge consumer of Scandi noir, this book looked promising. However, well-written as it is, technically, I found it a stone cold, plot-driven book with shallow characters who seemed to have no interior life, apart from who they fancied or what frightened them. Their back stories just seemed stapled onto them, without informing their personalities.
There was no nuanced empathy with any of the characters, they almost felt interchangeable. There was no sense of their emotional landscapes or human subtleties. Given that the book was supposed to be an exposure of the horror of incels, listening to this felt like an absolute assault on women, with very full explanations of how incels reach their conclusions, with appalling, repetitive and unnecessary abusive language regarding women, but no understanding of the women in the story and their experiences. After a brutal gang rape, one of the main protagonists goes about her daily life with no apparent trauma or physical repercussions. This made the book feel very asymmetric and an uncomfortable and discomforting listen for women. Really wish I hadn't listened to it.

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