Anne Mette Hancock is shortlisted for the Petrona Award 2024 with The Collector, published by Swift Press in the UK.
The judges words about the novel:
When ten-year-old Lukas disappears from his Copenhagen school, police investigators discover that the boy had a peculiar obsession with pareidolia: a phenomenon that makes him see faces in random things. A photo on his phone, posted just hours before his disappearance, shows an old barn door that resembles a face. Journalist Heloise Kaldan thinks she recognizes the barn – but from where? When Lukas’s blood-flecked jacket is found, DNA evidence points to Thomas Strand, a former soldier suffering from severe PTSD, but then Strand turns up dead in his apartment.
This is a complex thriller of buried secrets, that beautifully wrong-foots the reader from beginning to end.
You can read more here and the winner is announced on November 14th.
