COUNT TO ONE, COUNT TO TWO

TÆLLE TIL EN, TÆLLE TIL TO- COUNT TO ONE, COUNT TO TWO

By Søren Sveistrup

Count to one, count to two. A murder is on the loose, he’ll find you too
Count to three, four and five. Death is behind you, if you’re still alive.

IT IS A game of hide and seek. It is thirty years ago, and the sun is shining. The children, on a field trip with their teachers to a lake in the woods, are laughing and running around, finding places to hide, when a sudden scream pierces the summer sky and birds take flight.

MANY YEARS LATER, on a snowy afternoon in Copenhagen, a woman frantically looks at her phone and sees a picture of herself, taken just moments ago. She has just changed her phone number, again, but her stalker is getting closer and closer. She gets to her house and locks herself in, but the messages keep coming. When she is reported missing it will be too late.

SØREN SVEISTRUP HAS done it again. He has created a game of nailbiting hide and seek in which his two main characters, Mark Hess, a Europol investigator, and Naia Thulin, formerly of the murder squad, now on duty at the national center for cybercrime, must overcome their resentments towards each other in order to stop a determined and perverted killer.

MARK HESS IS in Copenhagen to see his brother, who has been hospitalized, and he is determined to return to Europol headquarters in The Haag  as soon as possible. Naia Thulin has left violent crimes to join the newly formed center for cybercrime, so she can have more time with her daughter and a new relationship. Their paths cross on the day, where Naia Thulin by mistake is called out to a missing woman’s house. The first piece of the puzzle leads to an unsolved murder two years earlier, but the answer is buried in an even more distant past.