Mo Malø keeps attracting French readers seeking unfamiliar places and sensations. – Pierrick Fay, Les Échos

The Inuit Woman, a major detective novel set in Greenland from Mo Malø.
After his “Qaanaaq” series, which sold over 150,000 copies in France, this author with a taste for wide-open spaces is back with an unforgettable character: a free-spirited woman with the soul of a warrior, who carries both her country’s wounds and its strength inside her.

Two murders have been committed in a tiny, remote village in Greenland that can only be reached by helicopter or dogsled. Only one person was at the scene both times: Paninguaq Madsen, a.k.a. the Inuit woman, who travels the country helping women who live far from decent medical facilities give birth. She has a traditional sewn Inuit tattoo on her face, the “walrus beard” that distinguishes a few exceptional women in the country.

Who is she really? An indigenous woman devoted to her own people, who is doing her best to counteract the Danish authorities’ negligence? Or a wounded woman who’s seeking a dangerous revenge?

When the Inuit woman goes on the run, two investigators get involved: a local cop who is more farcical than effective, but who knows the customs of that vast frozen continent, and a Danish police expert in charge of a cold case involving some of the country’s highest-ranking authorities. Because back in the 1950s, an experiment was run on 22 Inuit children aged 5 to 8: brutally torn from their families, they were re-educated to become the country’s Danish-speaking elite. Only 16 of them came back, and they were sent to an orphanage that caused lasting damage.

Is there a connection between the Inuit woman and her country’s betrayed past?