the Frieda Klein series, by Nicci French, suspense

The Frieda Klein series includes the titles Blue Monday, Tuesday’s Gone, Waiting for Wednesday, Thursday’s Child (also published as Thursday’s Children), Friday on My Mind, Saturday Requiem (also published as Dark Saturday), Sunday Morning Coming Down (also published as Sunday Silence), and Day of the Dead. (The books’ American titles and covers are sometimes different from the British ones.)

Is it strange to review an entire series in one review?

Maybe. But I read the series in four weeks, one of the few times I have binge-read a group of books, so it makes sense. I’m thankful that I didn’t start reading until after the final book was published. If you’re interested in the series, the books need to be read in order. Each one builds on the previous one. Some reviewers wrote that the books could be stand-alones, but I disagree. Start with Blue Monday.

Summary:

Frieda Klein, a London psychoanalyst, is a loner and an amnesiac who roams the streets in search of elusive sleep and even more elusive peace. She becomes involved in a child abduction case and butts heads with the DCI Malcolm Karlsson. When the case takes a horrible turn (thanks to her meddling), she becomes the target of killer Dean Reeve’s obsession. She seems to have an uncanny insight into Reeve’s thoughts. Their conflict results in murders, rejections, accusations, and threatens everything that Frieda holds dear. It culminates in the final book, Day of the Dead.

Along the way, Frieda, once a loner, begins to form a group of unlikely friends.
  • Reuben, her former mentor, flamboyant but disillusioned
  • Jack, her former mentee
  • Sandy, her on-again, off-again boyfriend
  • Sasha, her friend with a tendency to pick the wrong type of men
  • Chloe, her moody but adoring niece who needs Frieda’s help in chemistry (and much more)
  • Olivia, Chloe’s mother and Frieda’s former sister-in-law who survives on too much alcohol and the hope of finding the “right” man
  • Karlsson, who might or might not be smitten with Frieda (but don’t you dare say that to his face)
  • Yvette, Karlsson’s DC, who has a schoolgirl crush on her boss but knows it’s hopeless

One new friend falls into Frieda’s office. Literally. He is sleeping in the attic above her office when part of the ceiling collapses, dropping Josef into a counseling session with her client. He’s an illegal Ukrainian immigrant, a builder with a big heart and tendency to remodel things Frieda does not want remodeled (like her bathroom) and cook lots of Ukrainian food for his new British family. (From the reviews, it seemed that everyone who likes the series adores Josef.)

There’s much to like about this series. The characters are vivid and lively. Much like Louise Penny’s Three Pines novels, we get the sense of a community developing during the series.

There’s a variety of relationship types, which I’ve found is unusual.

(When was the last time you read about a woman mentoring a young man? I can’t think any that are developed in detail.) Instead of the community gathering around a geographic area, though, it is gathered together by Frieda, albeit unwillingly. In a time when loneliness is an epidemic, reading about a community of unlikely friends is refreshing and, for me, gives hope that such friendships are possible. This was a major part of the books’ appeal.

She’s a psychoanalyst, which I enjoyed reading about.

Throughout the series she tangles with the police force’s preferred “profiler,” the pompous but media-savvy Hal Bradshaw. He’s disdainful of Frieda, mostly because she’s often right and he isn’t. (He has a small moment of redemption in the final book.) I can’t say how accurate French’s interpretation of psychoanalytic work is, but it’s interesting how it’s worked into the plot and character development. I wrote down some of her thoughts.

For example, Frieda is talking to a client who has witnessed violence and wishes there was a drug to make him forget:

“As you know,” she said finally. “There is no such drug and no such operation and no quick fix because this is life and we’re actual people.”

“That’s not much of a comfort.”

“I’m not here to be a comfort. (…) I’m going to tell you something. This won’t go away. This will never stop being a part of your life, a part of who you are. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.” 

(Sunday Silence, Nicci French, page 157-8)

Later in the same book, she tells a journalist,

“Rules can be useful, but not when people use them as a prop to save them the trouble of thinking.” (Sunday Silence, Nicci French, page 255)

Two complaints:
Dean Reeve, Frieda’s arch nemesis, never seems as fully developed as he could be.

I was never quite certain why he committed the first crimes he did. (I can’t say much without giving away Blue Monday‘s plot.) He feel more like an omnipresent “feeling” than a fully developed character like, say, Josef or Frieda or Karlsson.

My other complaint is that several books revolve around deaths by hanging, which the police assume are suicides but turn out to be murders.

I question why the police investigators make this mistake. Wouldn’t the autopsy reveal if the victim was strangled prior to the hanging? There was little (I can’t think of any) mention of postmortem exams. Maybe I’m expecting too much or I’m too used to books that delve into forensics. But I would think it would be difficult for a killer to successfully deceive an experienced investigator in this way.

Overall, this was an enjoyable series.