I found the overall story line good and loved the Greenland setting as well as the historic tidbits about the Inuit and Vikings. The subject matter was also a bit difficult to read about at times but I understand that making the reader uncomfortable was part of the story.

I did however have a problem with the character dialogue.   Perhaps its an issue with translation but the dialogue felt stilted and unnatural.

I didn't find either Matthew or Jakob well characterized, maybe because the time was split between their narrations in 2014 and 1973. But I feel like Matthew needed more attention on the page, other than his history of tragedy.

Thank you to Netgalley and the author for an ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts.

This is a novel that falls into the "Arctic Noir" category. Like Nordic or Scandinavian Noir, it's dark and violent. It seems to use place in an even more affective way than the other genre, though--but if you like Nordic Noir, you will like this. If you don't like your fiction dark, then you might want to pass on this.

However, if you stick with it, you might really like it. Before reading this, I didn't realize how little I knew about Greenland (I say this with shame). I'm not going to suggest I now know Greenland after reading one fiction book, but it did trip my interest and I found myself doing research while reading and looking up pictures of the landscape. 

I also think the characters--while sometimes feeling a little flat--have lots of room to grow and I think this could develop into a good series. I also think some of the "flatness" I speak to (as well as some of the confusion with characters I experienced) could come down to translation issues. 

This is an exciting start from a new-to-America writer. I look forward to more translations from this author.

Thankyou to NetGalley, Text Publishing Company and the author, Meds Peder Nordbo, for the opportunity to read an advanced readers copy of The Girl Without Skin in exchange for an honest and unbiased opinion. 
I thought the premise of the story sounded so promising. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Not a book for me.

Very tough Scandi noir ..a bit reminiscent on its characterizations.. of stieg larsson.. but that's ok... there is the damaged Tupaarnaq, nearly sociopathic and covered in tatoos, imprisoned for 12 years,  and a damaged journalist in a new town uncovering the roots of an ugly (almost  incomprehensible)  crime and scandal .. the new man / journalist bumps into the big honchos  in  the town uncovering gruesome murders and rapes  in the past.  Innuit beliefs are engaged in,  and ancient heroic norsemen evoked.  Very dark... the writing is a bit weak at times,  but effective when required!

It's weird to refer to this grim Danish crime thriller as beautiful, but this is exactly that. Kudos to the translator Charlotte Barslund for doing an admirable job conveying the poetic intensity of the author's style. The book takes on Danish colonialism, Inuit exploitation, patriarchy, and corrupt men in power, all wrapped in descriptive passages of Nuuk and Greenlandic ice fields. There is a "girl with tattoo" trope here (I've never read those books), but handled sensitively and with thought.

This is apparently a series and I look forward to the other books but there is a sense that a Danish man is writing about "good" Danish men with regards to how they treat Inuit people and women, and while this is certainly welcome, I only hope it doesn't regress to a white male saviour trope as it progresses.

TW: There are grisly murder scenes, but you never get the sense of a voyeuristic eye describing it just to entertain the reader. (As you will with say, *cough*, Jo Nesbø.)

This was a really interesting read as the book is set in Greenland. It is gruesome and confusing in places but overall it is a good read. The plot is well thought out and I was gripped the whole way through. I would like to read more books by this author.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This was sounded so interesting and it lived up the hype. Well drawn characters and a good mystery. A wonderful book. I look forward to reading more from Nordbo!

The first book I have read set in Greenland.  Quite violent and gory in places but a really well written crime mystery.  I enjoyed it and would happily read others by the same author.

Although Mads Peder Norbo is not a new writer, having something like five novels under his belt, until now they have not appeared in English, but this is about to change as the English rights have been sold.  So here we are treated to an interesting tale set in Greenland.

The story is set in 2014, but there are some pieces here that take us back to the Seventies, where the main reason for this story really begins.  As a reporter takes up his post in Greenland after coming there from Denmark after losing his wife in a car crash, so he finds himself caught up in a mystery.  A body is found that may hark back to the Vikings, but whilst it is being protected overnight so it disappears, leaving a policeman dead in its place, dying from horrific wounds.

As the police start their investigations, so Matthew is led in another direction, looking back into the past, where the answers may lie.  With the help of an old notebook, and a heavily tattooed woman just released from prison, apparently who had viciously murdered her family, will our intrepid journalist really find out what has been going on and which has been kept buried?

This takes us into the world of politics, money and experiments, along with other crimes that can go on for years without being reported, and that can destroy families and lives.  In all then this is a good dark tale reminding us all of the horrors and depravities of life which can often happen near us and that we do not realise.  Personally, I felt that if the parts that went back into the past were shorter and thus more drip-fed to us this would have improved this slightly, as it would have kept us a bit more in the dark about what had been happening, but otherwise this is a good read.  Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an eARC.

A Viking has been discovered in the ice near Nuuk in Greenland. Reporters, as well as the police, have begun to figure out just how many hundreds of years the corpse has been waiting to be found. Less attractively, though, the body has been flayed and the skin has disappeared. Now there's a problem, because the title is 'girl without skin', and with all the flayed bodies which appear in the course of the book, there's no skinless woman. Even if the book had sensibly been 'the woman without skin' it wouldn't have solved the problem. 

There are some good touches, not least the woman (very definitely the woman) with a whole-body tattoo. But she is a victim of poor characterisation and what appear to be scenes straight out of television. Matthew, the young Danish hero (and journo--of course a journo), has the kind of back-story that could be anywhere. At the beginning of the story, there are attempts to situate current affairs. They don't work very well.

Text Publishing seem to be recruiting would-be authors at a rate of knots. Nordbo has the great good fortune to be translated into English by Charlotte Barslund.

I am sorry to say that I only managed to read one third of the book before I finally gave up.  The story switches between decades and is almost impossible to follow. What started with so much anticipation sadly fizzled out. 

I don’t recommend this book but thank Bookouture and Netgalley for this advance copy which I received in exchange for my unbiased review.  

One star

This is a great Scandinavian thriller that draws you in from the start. The story jumps between the present day and 1973, In the present day  Matt Cave who has recently moved from Denmark to Nuuk in Greenland to work for the local paper as a  journalist, running away because of the death of his girlfriend and their unborn child in a car accident. He's asked to cover a story of a presumed Viking mummy that has been discovered in the ice but it turns out to be more than he would ever of thought of , What starts of as an amazing discovery soon reveals similarities to some murders that happened in 1973 but someone wants the story hushed up. During the investigation he gets involved with a recently released murderer, Tapaarnaq a mysterious woman who has her own scores to settle.
You can not help but draw similarities to Stieg Larsson’s books but for fans of this kind of writing you will not be disappointed.

This review was originally posted on my blog 'Trails of Tales' 

You have a good lung capacity, right?

I hope you do

Because you are going to be holding your breath for a

Long

Long

Time

Until you reach the last page of ‘The Girl without Skin’.
I always felt that the nuances of a story are lost in translation.

That is what I discovered when I re-read the books that were originally published in my native language Bengali, in a more widely known language like Hind or English.

It is….just …not the same. Something always feels lacking.

Now since I am not familiar with Danish, I obviously cannot make a conclusion but I really do feel that Charlotte Barslund must have done a prrtty good job at translation because the language is so detailed and full of awe-inspiring subtleties.

It is hard to imagine that there would be something that is not encapsulated in the English version.

However, once you read this story threaded by Mads Peder Nordbo, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the original version does have something more.

And while we are on the subject of language, let me mention this.

The story begins and ends with the word skin. As if the author gave us a preamble and a reminder of the heart of his story.

After all

A skin is not just a body part

It is what covers all that is inside.

‘The Girl without a skin’ is a story centered in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, a town of 16000 residents surrounded by mountains and the sea.

Matthew Cave, a talented journalist haunted by the horrors in his past is assisgned to cover the the uncovering of a shriveled up Nordic viking mummy wrapped in fur.

It is set to become one of the greatest findings that might catapult all involved in this discovery to international fame.

It turns out though, international fame would have to wait.

The mummy….the extremely dead mummy

Disappears overnight.

You might ask, wasn’t anyone guarding the mummy.

A police personnel was.

And his body was found naked on the ice, flayed open, with most of his internal organs missing.

Gruesome much?

Put your seatbelts on my friends cause there is so much more of that.

So. Much. More

Against his better judgement, Matthew finds himself getting drawn into the mystery of the murder and disappearing mummy. More so when he finds out that in 1973 there were serial killings of similar nature that are still unsolved.

An outsider, Matthew has no inkling as to who can help him find the truth.

Our journalist thus decides to bestow his trust on the most unlikeliest candidate

Our Heroine or Anti-Heroine, Tupaarnaq

tatooed all over, completely bald and a suspect in the ongoing murder investigation.

Matthew finds himself in the possession of a diary, belonging to a detective who investigated the serial killings of 1973.

And so we are plopped into the middle of jumping timelines. The story of Matthew in 2014 and the story of Jakob in 1973. Woven through with exceedinly deft skills.

Stories with two different timelines do not always cut the mustard but Mads Peder Nordbo makes it work so well that the jumps feel more like effortless slips.

There is gore. Quite a lot of it.

There is abuse, greed, corruption, all of human vices at it’s worst. Personally, I always find it much harder to read of abuse (in any form) than gore.

But if you can handle all that and suspense thrillers make you as crazy excited as they make me

Then you have to read ‘The Girl without Skin’ by Mads Peder Nordbo and let all of its rawness seep under your skin.

ScandiNoir finally reaches that far Nordic outpost - Greenland! Graphic content, to be sure, but a nonetheless fascinating story.

I found this story confusing in parts, but i think that is me and my inability to remember all of the Danish and Greenland names.

The premise of the story is great - bodies being discovered as the ice melts due to global warming. With concurrent investigations into both these deaths and current deaths makes for an interesting read, though it must be said that the murders were particularly gruesome.

Having said this i do look forward to reading other books by this author.

Publisher's description of the book:
When a mummified Viking corpse is discovered on Greenland ice sheet, journalist Matthew Cave is sent out to report on the finding. The next day, the mummy has disappeared. The body of the police guard lies on the ice naked and flayed, echoing a gruesome series of unsolved murders from many years earlier. With no faith in the police, the only person Matthew dares to trust is a young Greenlandic woman who, at fourteen years old, was charged with killing her father in the same shocking manner. Nordbo has staked out a new frontier in Nordic Crime, setting his story against the forbidding beauty of Greenland.

**********************************

A warning to anyone who is interested in reading this book...the number of flayed, gutted, bodies rises during this book and some of the deaths are told in great detail, from the point of view of the person being gutted. This is not a book for the faint of heart with human death, seal death, incest and rape of young girls. I rarely read books with this much violence but I was interested in the "mystery" part of the book. 

The book jumps between the present (2014) and 1973 as a reporter in the present, Matt, and a police officer in the past, Jakob, investigate bodies, deaths, and more, that may be connected. You will feel the cold, the wet, the dreariness of the Greenland area where the book takes place. As the book goes from one timeline to the other, it's easy to not realize exactly how much takes place in such a short time span, in each timeline.  The is a lot of action packed into short amounts of time. 

Both timelines have a huge number of characters and places, with very unfamiliar names, to me, so it was often hard to remember who was who and what was what. The story is complex and there is a lot to remember from one timeline to the next. I would like to have felt clearer about everything that happened yet I know that my preference for less gruesome crime descriptions and unfamiliarity with most names, may have influenced my ability to enjoy the book more.  I did enjoy the characters, especially the police officer Jakob and would have liked to have known more about him. 

I rated this book 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. Thank you to Text Publishing and NetGalley for this ARC.

I got 16 percent of the way into this book, before opting to put it down and pick up another. Maybe it was the translation, but the conversations between characters didn't feel real. The set-ups to each scene felt out of place. The mysteries, the murders and the drama were solid but without real conversation and proper set-ups it all fell flat. That's why I'm almost certain it is a translation issue. Has to be. But since this is the translation, and there won't be another, I have to give my honest feedback on it and say overall it just wasn't good.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to preview this book. Reading about Greenland was interesting. The story was a little confusing in spots. Still enjoyable and recommended.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing a Kindle copy of this book for me to read and impartially review 

When a mummified Viking corpse is discovered on Greenland ice sheet, journalist Matthew Cave is sent out to report on the finding. The next day, the mummy has disappeared. The body of the police guard lies on the ice naked and flayed, echoing a gruesome series of unsolved murders from many years earlier. With no faith in the police, the only person Matthew dares to trust is a young Greenlandic woman who, at fourteen years old, was charged with killing her father in the same shocking manner.
This is the description provided NetGalley with regards to the book and it was enough to arouse my interest. Set in 2014 Matthew has arrived in Nuuk recovering from the loss of his Wife and unborn child in a car crash which left him with serious injuries, and finds himself thrust into investigating a cold case from 1973 which saw four men killed in almost identical grisly circumstances. He is helped by an heavily tattooed young woman recently released from prison for killing her entire family. Sound familiar by any chance, yes on the face of it the two main characters are somewhat similar to the brilliant 'Millennium Trilogy', and the heroine is every bit as feisty as Lisbeth Salander, but that aside the story more than stands on its own, and a gripping and gruesome at times story it is. This is a Greenland town full of terrible secrets, with corruption at the highest levels. Macabre and engrossing tense and at times the tension chills you as much as the descriptions of Greenland's bleak landscape and weather. Well written descriptive with a real sense of the characters and their surroundings, bleak and cold in every sense of the word, there are twist and turns some of which i am pleased to have guessed, some i did not but throughout totally engaging.
Hopefully this is is the start of a series.
Thoroughly recommended.

This is a good crime novel written in a Greenland setting.  Matt Cave a journalist, is sent to report on an ancient Viking mummy that has been uncovered from a glacier.  Along the way he uncovers a link to four brutal murders that were committed twenty years ago.