What The Water Kept: Book One of the Astrid Moth series - Couverture souple

Falk, Lucy

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798184685823

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

A retired teacher's death is ruled an accident. The shoebox under her bed says otherwise.

When social worker Astrid Moth is assigned to close out the estate of Ulla Kristiansen — found dead at the edge of the Maribo lake — it looks like routine paperwork. An elderly woman, a soft riverbank, a thaw that made the ground give way. Case closed.

Then Astrid finds four shoeboxes hidden under the bed. Thirty-one years of a primary school teacher's private records: names, dates, injuries, the children she reported — and the same word, over and over, in the response column. Closed.

What begins as estate administration becomes something else entirely: a quiet, methodical reckoning with a welfare system that has been managing its failures instead of fixing them, on the same streets, for three decades. As Astrid cross-references Ulla's handwritten archive against the official record, she finds every case exactly where Ulla left it — and a pattern with a shape that isn't random. The eastern side of town. Always the eastern side of town.

The deeper she goes, the more the people around her — a colleague who makes her coffee every morning, a department head who has run this office for eighteen years, a brother who has unknowingly fed referrals into the same broken machine — become part of a story that was never about one teacher's quiet obsession. It was about what a town agrees not to see, and who pays for the agreement.

And somewhere in the last details of Ulla's death, Astrid finds something that isn't supposed to be an accident at all.

What The Water Kept is Book One in the Astrid Moth series — a slow-burn Scandinavian crime novel for readers of Faceless Killers, Smilla's Sense of Snow, and The Killing. There is no serial killer. No race against the clock. Just a patient, devastating excavation of institutional failure, written in the restrained, atmospheric tradition of Nordic noir — where the real crime was never a mystery to the people it happened to, only to the system meant to stop it.

For readers who want their crime fiction cold, quiet, and honest about what justice actually costs.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798184685823
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 143
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg