Norwegian American author Alex Dahl has a fine touch for compelling tales full of desperation, dark secrets, and complicated family relationships.
In After She’d Gone, her fifth novel to be published in English, Dahl pulls readers behind the catwalk’s curtain into the ugly side of the ‘glamorous’ world of international modelling.
Frazzled single Mum Liv is trying to make ends meet and keep her past secret, while living a quiet life in Norway with her neurodivergent son, Adrian. International model Anastasia has traded a humble home in Russia for the catwalks of Milan and Paris. Tenacious Oslo journalist Selma despairs at bosses stymieing a story she’s been working on about the dark underbelly of the modelling industry. Then Selma scents a new story: a woman and her son have vanished. Selma uncovers links to something far bigger, entwined with money, power, and influence. Meanwhile, Anastasia is discovering how, in modelling, young women’s bodies are commodities to be used for the profit and pleasure of others, and Liv and Adrian are trying to survive unsettling new circumstances.
Dahl canvasses tough themes in this slick, page-whirring thriller, from sex trafficking and drugs to the abuse of women in the fashion world. A disturbing, tense tale; riveting, even as its talented author takes readers into some pretty uncomfortable places.
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Dahl is an American/Norwegian crime novelist who writes in the Nordic noir genre. Her works have been translated into 12 languages, and she was described by Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in 2019 as a new star of Nordic noir literature.
She was Alex Dah born in Oslo and is the critically acclaimed author of The Boy at the Door. She graduated with a B.A. in Russian and German linguistics with international studies and went on to complete an M.A. in creative writing at Bath Spa University, followed by an M.S. in business management at Bath University. Alex has published short stories in the U.K. and the U.S. and is a serious Francophile.
Her first novel, Før jeg forlater deg (Before I Leave You), was published in Norwegian under the name Alexandra Bockfeldt in 2013.
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