Cecilia Wilborg, an interior stylist, is married to a banker and lives with him and their two daughters in an enviable home in Sandefjord--"the Hamptons of Norway, they call it." The easily agitated Cecilia, whose narration drives The Boy at the Door, doesn't handle disruption well, and she faces a major one the day eight-year-old Tobias goes unclaimed at the pool where her daughters swim. The facility's receptionist, whose phone calls to the contact number on file for the boy go straight to voicemail, asks Cecilia to drive Tobias to the address on record. Cecilia reluctantly ferries him to the house and finds it abandoned. Grudgingly, she takes Tobias home with her, intending to grant him only an overnight stay.
When the body of a woman named Annika Lucasson washes up in a harbor, the police suspect that she is Tobias's mother. The woman's journal entries, which appear throughout the novel, describe her drug-addled existence with her physically abusive boyfriend and attest that Tobias was in the couple's care before he met Cecilia, with whom, as it happens, Annika has a connection.
Alex Dahl's literary debut offers one of the payoffs of good psychological thrillers: a cagey narrator whose reliability is both the reader's and the police's job to determine. The Boy at the Door is Scandi noir for fans of Big Little Lies, whose denizens are likewise hell-bent to convince the world that pretty on the outside means pretty on the inside. (It doesn't.) --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer