Christian Jungersen's The Exception - United Kingdom

Read The Exception on holiday, when it matters less if you can't sleep. It's a murder mystery, full of mental and physical cruelty. And it's a roman à thèse about evil, which is what will really keep you awake. It reminded me of the novels of Patricia Highsmith, and even more of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. … such a horribly vivid and fiendishly clever novel.
Independent

Christian Jungersen provides an excellent example of what we find admirable in Scandinavian crime writers. His second novel, The Exception, is concerned with ideas about the meaning, causes and implications of human cruelty. It won the Danish Golden Laurels prize (the equivalent of the Booker) and has been a bestseller across Europe.
     … The need to find out comes to have a real urgency, more compelling than the synthetic suspense of the serial-killer thriller.
     The solution to the mystery seems both surprising and inevitable, as it should be in the best crime fiction. The Exception is an interesting novel with quite unexpected pace and a great deal to tell us about the psychological games we play with other people and with ourselves.
     The translation is so smooth and the translator so unobtrusive that it becomes hard to remember this novel was not written in English.
Times Literary Supplement

Because its theme is office politics, this original and brilliantly constructed thriller will appeal to readers who normally steer clear of murder mysteries.
Sunday Times

Christian Jungersen has come up with a novel that confronts evil on a less obvious level than that which crops up in many books. It is a psychological evil, which turns friend against friend and forces the characters to question everything they thought they knew about each other.
     The Exception is a page-turning novel … a book that will linger in the mind long after the last page has been turned.
Sunday Business Post

United Kingdom - The Exception