Follow the Butterfly

Martta Kaukonen

Original title: Terapiassa

Author: Martta Kaukonen

Published: 2021

Publisher: WSOY

Genre: Crime & Suspense

Pages: 407

Part of a series: Follow the Butterfly

Reading material:

English edition,  German edition, Italian edition

Can she cure a killer? An addictive psychological thriller in the spirit of Gillian Flynn!

Ira, 20, a serial killer who was abducted as a child, starts therapy with celebrity therapist Clarissa. Only one of them knows that they share a mutual secret from the past. Will the other one realize it before she gets murdered?

Clarissa is a middle-aged psychotherapist, the best in her field. She is familiar to everyone from her TV appearances and from glossy magazines. For her, every patient is a princess. And someone only she can save. Or can she? Clarissa already has one suicide to answer for; a teenage boy’s death never seizes to haunt her.

When Ira becomes Clarissa’s patient, a cat-and-mouse game begins in which rules are followed by no one. The kind of game that never ends well.

“A gripping debut psychological thriller, we reckon you’re going to find this one seriously hard to put down.”

Glamour Magazine UK, “Best New Books March 2024”

"Breathlessly plotted, deviously constructed, and brought to vivid, twisted life by an antiheroine for the ages... An utterly beguiling debut. This isn’t just a thriller you sink your teeth into—it’s a thriller that sinks its teeth right back into you."

– Elizabeth Little, author of Pretty as a Picture, US

Kaukonen demonstrates an extraordinary mastery of language, using it like a scalpel to dissect human frailties. The writing is dense, evocative, full of metaphors and symbolisms that transform each scene into a small enigma to be deciphered. The descriptions are so vivid that they are almost tangible, but instead of offering certainties, they amplify the sense of bewilderment, making Butterfly more similar to a surrealist painting than to a conventional plot. — Butterfly is a hypnotic and disturbing journey, which requires the reader to abandon all expectations and be transported into a world where nothing is as it seems. Martta Kaukonen has created a work of art that challenges the conventions of the genre, proving that the thriller can be much more than a simple game of suspense.

– Monica Col, Zetatielle online magazine, Italy

Download reading materials

Rights sold:
FINLAND: WSOY (orig.)
CROATIA: Znanje
CZECHIA: Albatros Media
DENMARK: Forlaget Falco
ESTONIA: Hea Lugu
FILM & TV: Legendary Tobis TV
GERMANY: Heyne
GREECE: Psichogios
HUNGARY: Partvonal Kiadó
ITALY: Longanesi
LATVIA: Jumava
LITHUANIA: Obuolys
POLAND: Czarna Owca
WORLD ARABIC: Al Arabi
WORLD ENGLISH: Pushkin Press, Audible (audio)

Video

Foreign covers

About author

Martta Kaukonen

Martta Kaukonen (1976) lives in Helsinki. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a film critic, whose reviews have been published in both Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and a popular women’s weekly magazine Me Naiset. Martta has a master’s degree in arts. She has interviewed the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Justin Bieber. Martta met her husband at his second hand bookshop and fell in love. Alongside writing, Martta loves psychological thrillers, film noir, flea markets, abandoned houses and travelling. 

Bibliography


2025, Crime & Suspense

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Free


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Meet Me in the Darkness


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In Your Shadow


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Follow the Butterfly