Before I Confess

A woman keeps a second set of house keys in a jar of dried lentils, and that small odd habit is the first thing that makes you lean forward in this book.

Before I Confess is a tight, fast psychological thriller for readers who like their narrators a little too smooth and their plots a little too neat until suddenly neither is true. Nikolai Brendt keeps his story close and domestic, set mostly inside one apartment and the rainy streets just outside it. His central character, a translator named Mara, is hiding something from the first page, and the pleasure is in watching everyone around her hide things too. The question the book keeps asking is whether Mara is the victim or the architect of what happens to her family, and Brendt never gives you a clean answer even when you think he has.

Somewhere in the final quarter there is a confrontation in a car park, just after a funeral, where two people who have been circling each other for two hundred pages finally say the thing they have both been refusing to say. It is a short scene and a quiet one, but it shifts everything that came before it. The ending that follows earns its unease. You will not feel cheated, but you will not feel settled either, and for a while after closing the book you will think differently about what trusting someone actually requires.