The North Face of the Heart

Written by Dolores Redondo

Narrated by Emma Gregory

In a propulsive thriller by the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Baztán Trilogy, a female detective follows a psychopathic killer into the eye of a storm.

Amaia Salazar, a young detective from the north of Spain, has joined a group of trainees at the FBI Academy in Virginia. Haunted by her past and having already tracked down a predator on her own, Amaia is no typical rookie. And this is no ordinary student lecture at Quantico. FBI agent Aloisius Dupree is already well acquainted with Amaia’s skills, her intuition, and her ability to understand evil. He now needs her help in hunting an elusive serial killer dubbed “the Composer,” and in solving another case that’s been following him his whole life.

From New Jersey to Oklahoma to Texas, the Composer’s victims are entire families annihilated in the chaos of natural disasters, their bodies posed with chilling purpose amid the ruins. Dupree and Amaia follow his trail to New Orleans. The clock is ticking. It’s the eve of the worst hurricane in the city’s history. But a troubling call from Amaia’s aunt back home awakens in Amaia the ghosts from her childhood and sends her down a path as dark as that of the coming storm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Translator: Michael Meigs
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781713555070

Dolores Redondo

Dolores Redondo was born in Donostia-San Sebastian in 1969, where she studied Law and Gastronomy. The Invisible Guardian was published in Spain in 2013, with rights sold in thirty languages. It was chosen as 'Best Crime Novel of the Year' by the major Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia and over 600,000 readers turned the series into one of Spain's biggest literary successes in recent years. Dolores Redondo currently lives and writes in the Ribera Navarra area of Spain.

Reviews for The North Face of the Heart

[Mary Anne Zimmerman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author is a superb storyteller. This blood kept me engaged for the entire read, and it’s a long one. The reader was very good only stumbling with the Creole accents. With so many characters, she really did quite well.

[kitchicken · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

CW: This book is not for anyone who has storm anxiety, PTSD (especially around natural disasters), issues surrounding childhood trauma, or someone with experience in and around Hurricane KatrinaWarnings for on page mention of animal and human death.Is it literature? A fantastic journey? A hard-boiled police procedural? The story of childhood trauma? This is story, I'm afraid. of a book that tried to do too much, be too many things, and ultimately fell short. However, I do want to add that this book kept me up to read to the end because I wanted to find out what happened. Though I admit it also was out of morbid curiosity to see just everything was going to be resolved--or not--and what facts would be included--or not. My conclusion when I closed my Kindle cover? "Huh? That was....something."With three separate mysteries, and two of them not really being mysteries at all, since the characters and the reader knew who had committed the crime, it was more of a matter of reading to see how it all ended. With one mystery solved, but still open-ended, and the other solved in fantastical fashion, the book was left feeling very disjointed and rambling. And it's not the first in a series, which means there will be no closure here. I admit I rather don't care, either. Add in supernatural facts, plus the usual ingredients when one is in New Orleans and someone wants to impart the "flavor" and all the research they did, not to mention medical causes and issues from research better left on the editing table, and I can't really recommend this story. The book really felt like it was trying to do too much, be too many things, and some judicious editing may have been in order here. I liked and was invested in the lead character, but the rest felt like cardboard cut outs playing on too big of a stage.

[janerawoof · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Spanish woman assistant inspector attending an FBI seminar in Quantico, becomes involved in the hunt for a serial killer with a specific MO: killing a family of a certain size after a natural disaster and making it look like the disaster killed them. The case leads them to New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.Engrossing how the killer was traced and finally caught. Much local color in the form of LA voodoo beliefs. The book was a bit too long at 600+ pp. It could have been tightened. A prequel to the author's Baztán trilogy.