The Frieda Klein series, which include eight titles: Blue Monday, Tuesday’s Gone, Waiting for Wednesday, Thursday’s Child, Friday on My Mind, Saturday Requiem, Sunday Morning Coming Down, and Day of the Dead, revolves around psychologist Frieda Klein and is the creation of husband-and-wife duo Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (pen name: ‘Nicci French’).
Despite not being an avid thriller fan, although I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a Deon Meyer novel, I found myself utterly engrossed from page one and didn’t stop for several weeks until I’d inhaled all eight books. Needless to say, I’m now a Nicci French convert; they are, in my relatively unschooled opinion, among the best purveyors of psychological thrillers around today. The stories are clever, complex and gripping, while protagonist Frieda Klein is a compassionate, determined, gritty and highly likeable heroine. (I recommend reading the books in order.)
Frieda is an intuitive London psychoanalyst, a loner and an insomniac who roams the streets at night when sleep eludes her. During these nighttime wanderings she introduces the reader to many historical landmarks of this wonderful city, as well as to its various mysterious underground rivers. I was so fascinated by the latter that I actually researched these forgotten rivers as I went along.
The series kicks off with Blue Monday, during which Frieda becomes embroiled in an abduction case. The police unit investigating the case relies purely on conventional methods and dismisses Frieda’s psychoanalyst’s intuition out of hand, but, of course, this doesn’t stop Frieda from being drawn into the heart of the case. She unearths a new lead from another abduction case 20 years prior, and in the process of hunting down the perp, Frieda becomes the object of the killer’s obsession. This game of cat and mouse continues throughout the series and serves up a slew of sinister mind games and delicious twists and turns.
Although a loner at heart, Frieda eventually finds herself, through chance and circumstance, surrounded by an unlikely group of loyal friends. This community of interesting characters and quirky outcasts make for additional fun and serve up side plots that only enhance the suspense. A further delight is the superb character development among this little cast, all of whom I felt I knew personally by the eighth book and rued saying farewell to by the end of it.
There are simply too many to mention and their unique and complex characters warrant a deeper dive than I have room for here, so without doling out spoilers all I’ll say is that it is this wonderful cast and the role they play in Frieda’s life and in the development of the plot that make this such an appealing read.
I would not call this a literary triumph by any stretch, but I can vouch for a highly readable, engaging and fun series that will keep you glued from the first instalment to the last.
