Follow the Butterfly

FOLLOW THE BUTTERFLY by Martta Kaukonen has been nominated for the Viktor Crime Award, a prestigious prize hosted by Germany’s most successful thriller author Sebastian Fitzek.

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”

“Martta Kaukonen provides a modern psychological pacer, with Follow the Butterfly (Pushkin Vertigo, 2024, £16.99), a Finnish work about the psychoanalysis of a serial killer, a work with multiple narrators and a mass of puzzles as links between the characters are shaken in the kaleidoscope of the plot.”

– Jeremy Black, The Critic, UK

"Follow the Butterfly is the portrait of a failing marriage, a demonstration of the perils and pitfalls of “the talking cure” and a brilliant game of cat and mouse between author and reader. [--] Whether, in the end, you believe either of them, there’s no denying the pieces of this psychological thriller fit together as ingeniously as those in a Chinese puzzle box."

- Mark Sanderson, The Times, UK

"An exciting, pacy page turner. I loved the smoke and mirrors atmosphere, overlain with a sense of poignancy about damaged lives, the power of the imagination to trick us (and to protect us), and the passage of time. “

–Ali Knight, author of Until Death, UK

“The most suspenseful and surprising book in a long time. Only a few sentences in I realised: I am the fly in the spider net.”

- Ulla Müller, Bayern 1 radio (24. March 2023), Germany