Frieda Klein

About the Frieda Klein series

Frieda Klein is a solitary, insomniac London psychotherapist who gets pulled into police investigations almost against her will, first as a reluctant consultant to Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Karlsson and then, as the series darkens, as a target in her own right. Each of the eight novels is named for a day of the week, moving in order through the calendar across the series rather than resetting with each book -- Blue Monday introduces Frieda through a case eerily similar to a patient's dream, and by the time the cycle completes on The Day of the Dead, events set in motion in the first book have built into one long, continuous story rather than eight independent mysteries.

Running underneath the police cases is a single sustained antagonist, the escaped killer Dean Reeve, whose presence (real, imagined, or both) haunts Frieda across the entire run and gives the series its slow-building dread. Nicci French -- the joint pen name of married writers Nicci Gerrard and Sean French -- builds Frieda's inner life, her strained family relationships, and her circle of friends and patients with the same patience the duo brought to their earlier standalone thrillers, so that the mysteries never overwhelm the character study at the series' center.