THE NIGHT FLOWERS

Two skilled narrators, Saskia Maarleveld and Carlotta Brentan, present this sensitive police procedural. In an unusual narrative pattern, Brentan reads the first-person chapters and Maarleveld presents the third-person sections. Both narrators convey the richly articulated characters of the three female protagonists, a genealogist, a middle-aged cold case investigator, and the ghost of a murder victim whose body was found in a barrel in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. The voices of all the women are thoughtful and instantly relatable. This skillfully narrated debut novel, a study in the psychology of violence, is a new take on a familiar genre. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2023]