Betrayed (Bedragen)

Katerina Janouch

 

Cecilia Lund loves her hospital job, where she’s in the middle of life’s most dramatic moments: birth and death. Her private life is more difficult. She has four children, her husband John, a photographer, and a nice house in the suburbs. Every day is filled to the brim, though there’s some stress in their marriage due to their hectic work lives, but she’s content. And the way it’s always been is the way it’s going to continue, right?

 

Then someone rings the doorbell, and their lives are ripped apart. A young man, named Simon, is standing there in the winter chill declaring that John is his father – Simon is the result of a passionate teenage love story.

 

Simon needs a family and a place to belong. John has to go on a long business trip abroad, and Cecilia finds herself confronting the secretive Simon on her own, while the tensions in her marriage threaten to break it apart. A net of unexplained events and deceit draws around Cecilia’s family, and it’s no longer clear who is betraying whom.

 

Betrayed is the first book in a planned series of relationship thrillers featuring the midwife Cecilia Lund.

 

390 pages

 

English reading material available. Translation by Neil Betteridge.

 

Rights sold

The Czech Republic: Mlada Fronta

The Netherlands: Rode Kamer

Sweden: Piratförlaget

 

Reviews

”…it’s hot and important. With Betrayed Katerina Janouch creates a crime novel where birth instead of death has taken the place as creator of tension. I’m glad that there will be more books about Cecilia Lund. I prefer her before another discarded chief inspector”

Helsingborgs Dagblad

 

”It soon becomes a crescendo of race reading. It’s so unpleasant I sometimes have to read the end of the next page before I get there. Among the best I read for a very long time.”

Hennes

 

”Betrayed is a well written story including a convincing portrait of a woman mixed with a mystic chain of events. It’s exiting and shocking.”

BTJ