The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis is a dramatic crime thriller set in 21st century Denmark. The action revolves around the discovery of a 3-year-old boy stuffed into a suitcase in a train station locker. Basically he's an undocumented immigrant kid who's been kidnapped and sold to a wealthy Danish businessman and his wife to replace their little boy who died. The man, Jan, tells his assistant to go pick him up, but she sends the locker key to her friend who works for the Red Cross and often deals with human trafficking. Nina, the Red Cross worker, retrieves the boy from the locker and sets out on a quest to reunite him with his mom, all the while being chased by Jan's goons.
This book is told chapter-by-chapter from the multiple perspectives of the main characters. Each is unaware of the events occurring to the others -- or even of the others' existences. By bits and pieces, the audience is enabled to piece together a narrative of true events. This type of storytelling technique is rather ill suited for a crime thriller because the readers already know information which the narrating characters do not know, so some chapters become melodramatic and dull, particularly Sagita's section. That being said, Kaaberbol and Friis excel at plot development, piecing together a complex and intriguing narrative from these multiple perspectives. It's the audience's responsibility to put all the events in the right place of the meta-narrative.
Kaaberbol and Friis obviously wrote this book as part of a political agenda. The story is packed with hot button issues and activism, specifically in the character of Nina. Nina works as a human rights activist, assisting illegal immigrant families to get jobs and find legal protections and get access to education and so on. Passionate about her work, Nina often neglects her family in order to help those less privileged. This is not to say she's an unfit mother; in fact she's an exceptional mom who teaches her kids the value of all human life. This being said, Nina's blind devotion to humanism leads her to make some questionable choices and endanger herself. In her distress over protecting the boy, she chooses to leave without telling her family or the police. The authors' agenda overcomplicates the plot, but they do present it respectfully and thoughtfully for the most part.
