The Guilty One

Emma Tapper, Book 1

By: Anna Karolina, Lisa Reinhardt - translator

Narrated by: Moira Quirk

Is he guilty or innocent? Even he doesn’t know…

On the eve of their thirtieth birthday, twins Jasmine and Nicolas Moretti celebrate late into the night. But when Nicolas wakes several hazy hours later, Jasmine is dead—and he is covered in her blood. Panicking, he takes the murder weapon and runs into the cold Stockholm night.

For the police, it’s an open-and-shut case. Nicolas is guilty. And given that he remembers so little of what happened that night, even he isn’t convinced of his innocence.

Emma Tapper, an ex-cop driven to drink by a tragedy she’s devastated she couldn’t prevent, is recruited by defence lawyer Angela Köhler to help with the high-profile Moretti case. While her new boss seems more concerned with winning than discovering the truth, Emma begins investigating the circumstances of the murder.

As she digs into the case, Emma finds herself clashing with former colleagues who are convinced they already know the truth. And the more horrific secrets she unearths, the more her own traumatic past returns to haunt her. She’s not used to working to free a man behind bars, but something tells her Nicolas might be innocent. But if he didn’t do it, who did?

©2020 Anna Karolina by Agreement with Grand Agency. (P)2022 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2022 by Lisa Reinhardt

Story good, narration not great

Decent writing, good character development, narration distracted. OK for dialog but narration of general prose was breathy and overly dramatic.

Shocking mystery. Wow

The plot and characters are quite interesting. The twists (and the twisted) are abundant. The ending gobsmacked me. But.. what's up with the narration? It's either *LOUD* or incomprehensibly quiet. Unsure whether this is due to narrator or the production.

narration issues

good story but the narrators voice goes soft and then dialogue is loud so constant adjustment of audio is necessary.

Good story

Improvement

This book was good to listen to. I’m disappointed with two of the main characters being so gullible. At times I didn’t know who was speaking. The former detective was never thinking with her head. It’s also so ignorant for her to continue to drink and investigate. If that’s so she should have been fired let alone her avoiding procedure, Let alone her twin sister with trampish behavior.

You’re very close to Emma not being a character who is redeeming. I work in law enforcement and her violation of everyone disgusts me. Don’t fake these ignorant incidents. That doesn’t happen in normal law enforcement. She couldn’t investigate out of a paper bag.

Pretty Good-Almost Great

I thought a bit before writing a review because the book has a lot to recommend: a more novel plot line, good characters, and a credible pacing that kept one wanting to hear what was next. The challenge with the book was that the novelty came at the expense of engagement with the characters by the end--had to not care for them quite as much to keep on with it--and iteration of their personal flaws got to be tedious, think better editing would have helped. The end begged credulity and potentially undermined the characters to such an extent it makes me wonder if it is worth reading the next book to be released soon. The sound/and or narraator for a good deal of the book sounds oddly mushy like she was reading with marbles in her mouth but it is survivable. All this makes the book sound too challenging to venture, but in all it was worth a credit.