'The Killing' is the twistiest murder mystery I have ever read. Just when I thought, 'Oh! It was ...' the plot takes another spiraling u-turn down a rabbit hole that somehow our favorite jaded TV woman detective, Sarah Lund, continues to follow.

Ok, yes, the author, David Hewson, cheats by withholding key pieces of evidence, which when revealed, had me groaning in amused amazement at how Hewson managed to root out yet another tangle from the story, but I was entertained, gentle reader! This book is a quite a rollercoaster ride down into secret and unmapped tunnels!
I wonder if Hewson has ever tried knitting? I think he'd be good at it.

This version of 'The Killing' is very good despite the fact it could have possibly fallen to the degradation photographers see when a photograph is a copy of a copy of a copy, called generation loss, or it could have suffered from the issues of what researchers and reconstructionists of old documents often must suss out from palimpsests. It stands up on its on strong legs. So, gentle reader, if you saw the original Danish Broadcasting Corporation TV show, or the BBC show, or the American AMC reboot with Seattle, Washington State detectives instead of the original Danish actors as detectives, this book is still another strong reimagining of the original screenplay. It has lost nothing from the transformation of screenplay to novel. Also, Hewson gave it a different ending, although the bones of the original story are in place: the characters of the obsessed Sarah Lund and her brash ambitious new partner, the two politicians fighting a bloody combat for the same elective office and their immoral support staff, and of course, the hapless beautiful murder victim and her ex-criminal family, looking for justice.

The delight of this dark mystery is mostly in how it plays out, so this is as far as I intend to reveal the plot. I recommend reading this book first before seeing the two screenplay versions. It is that good.