review: the hanging by lotte and soren hammer

After an early-arrival student finds the bodies of five men hanging in the school gym, the police are called in to investigate. The lead on the case is Konrad Simonsen, who is the center of a new series from brother and sister Lotte and Soren Hammer. As Simonsen and his team work to identify not only the killer but the mutilated victims, they realize they have two major clues—pizza was ordered in advance for a “party” and the victims are all pedophiles.

That sounds like a great premise, right? Unfortunately, The Hanging comes across as a very passive episode of Law & Order with atrocious dialogue. There was no action as everything took place off the page—even the discovery of the bodies is the boy telling his sister what he saw rather than him actually seeing it. The primary killers are revealed early on and without fanfare. In a graveside confession to his dead father, one of the men, who says he’s felt a “darkness” since childhood, reveals he felt the need to take action after being upset by a campaign at work though he admits it’s no worse than others. The true motivation for the killers is to rid Denmark of child abusers as the killers were victims themselves. (If they really wanted to protect children, the bodies shouldn’t have been left where children would be sure to discover them.) The Hanging is a lackluster, disjointed crime novel.

About the audiobook: Narrator Michael Page has read a number of audiobooks, but his narration is better than the character voices. Page uses different inflections to try to distinguish the characters, but his female and children voices were lacking as he just made his voice higher pitched and in the case of children, slightly whiny. The Hanging by Lotte and Soren Hammer was published by AudioGO in 2013. It runs 12 hours.
1/5
Review copy provided by Audiobook Jukebox.