Three sisters. Three tales. And one secret, dark as night.

By accident, a young mailman in a Dublin suburb finds a slain woman’s diary in the dead letter bin. From beyond the grave, she reveals the secrets of the most tragic love story he’s ever heard. But that’s not the end of the tale. It’s only just begun.

The story engrosses young Niall, avidly reading the mystery about the itinerant storyteller Jim, who travelled around Ireland, enrapturing audiences with his macabre tales. Horrific murders were being committed wherever he went. The victims were young women, who bore an all too frightening similarity to the victims in Jim’s own fictional plots.

Three young sisters in a small town were the only ones who begun to suspect that these were more than mere coincidences. They began to investigate Jim’s past. But they should never have tried to peer behind the storyteller’s mask. For behind the polished charm lurked something else much better suited for dark fiction than the light of day.

As Niall finds another sister’s diary, he now understands what happened to two of the three sisters. But the third has vanished, and hides somewhere in the wilds of western Ireland. He must now find her while there’s still time. Or they’re both forsaken. And in the woods, the wolves from Jim’s stories begin to gather…

Darling Jim is a modern gothic thriller with elements drawn from classic mythology.

First published by Politikens Forlag, Denmark, 2007.
320 pages.

Nominated for Nouvel Observateur Prix du Roman Noir 2009
Nominated for Le Prix Polar SNCF 2009

Denmark, Politikens Förlag
Sweden, Lind & Co
Sweden, Pocketförlaget (paperback)
Sweden, Earbooks (audio book)
Norway, Schibsted
Germany, Piper
Germany, HörGut! (audio book)
The Netherlands, De Geus
US & Canada, Henry Holt
Poland, Rebis
Croatia, Fraktura
Romania, R.A.O.
Russia, Mir Knigi
Italy, Marsilio Editore
France, Serpent Noir (Editions Du Rocher)
China/Taiwan, Sun Color Culture Publishing (complex characters)
Korea, Eunhaengnamu
Spain, Planeta
Portugal, Presenca

The reader is fired up by the tale of the three sisters and their endearing - but also clumsy - knight, but the whole thing is borne aloft by Jim’s story about the princely brothers Euan and Ned. Christian Moerk’s grasp of this framed fairy tale is expertly done – it contains all the romance and gothic terror to suit anyone’s desire. In places, the tale harkens back to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), a wonderful film adaptaton of one of Angela Carter’s novellas, in which innocence and erotic inauguration are connected in the most masterly fashion to a terrified fascination with wolves… Fortunately, Christian Moerk isn’t afraid to paint with all the colors on his palette. “Darling Jim” is filled to the brim with passion and strong feelings and exquisite evil – a fairy tale for grownups, who can still remember the magic contained in four little words: “Once upon a time…”
Katinka Bruhn, Weekendavisen

“Darling Jim” is the kind of thriller that Stephen King could have written on a good day…The story is framed traditionally: The mailman Niall reads one diary, and later another from a different sister, which all tell the story of Jim, who himself has a tale to tell. But everything is woven together, when events reach a climax with Niall as its catalyst. Christian Moerk’s new novel is a psychological thriller, which wends its way through the darkest corners of the mind, using the foreboding myths of Ireland as its backdrop. As soon as you’ve gotten a few pages into the book, its just as hard to put down for the reader as it is for Darling Jim’s listeners to free themselves from the teller’s tale.
Lars Ole Sauerberg, Jyllands-Posten

The mailman Niall can’t let go of this tale, and none of us readers are able to, either… Christian Moerk exploded onto the scene last year with the suspense novel “The Council of Ten.” This time, he has cleverly modernized the classic, gothic tale and mixed it up with daring mythological material… It’s hard to put down “Darling Jim” until the final piece of the puzzle has been revealed. And Christian Moerk writes with the kind of bloody sensuousness that makes you think you can actually feels the wolf’s hot breath at the back of your neck.
Hans Bjerregaard, Ekstra Bladet

This time around, Christian Mørk has cranked up the wildness and pure thrill of telling a story, which makes “Darling Jim” a much more fascinating book than his first, “The Council of Ten,” which was published last year. Simply put, you can feel how this colorful tale comes right from the heart, rather than the kind of lab that produces bestsellers that are too clever by half.
Mørk’s imagination was kick-started by a real-life story in an Irish newspaper, but from there, his story assumes a different kind of shape. Wolf-men, princes, bards, three captivating sisters, and a frightening aunt populate the book’s fairy-tale like universe, which exists in the borderlands between magic and reality.
Mørk stresses the colorful and cartoonish aspects of his story, because he lets the main character Niall become our storyteller and guide. You see, Niall is also an aspiring comic book artist, who pays the rent by working at the local post office, before anyone is willing to pay for his drawings. In this way, he discovers a diary, which will change his life.
Niall finds the diary in the dead letter bin inside the pitiful post office after another disastrous attempt at rendering a wolf on paper. He brings it home, since it appears to have been written by one of the sisters, who recently were held captive and murdered by their aunt nearby.
The case has never been solved, and Niall discovers that the answers can’t be found in Dublin, but, rather, in the tiny hamlet of Castletownbere. This is where the sisters and their aunt are from. And it’s here that a young man on a bright red motorcycle roared into town, changing their lives forever.
The young man’s name was Jim, and was a so-called seanchaí, an itinerant storyteller, journeying through the country. Right from the start, the eldest sister, Fiona, is captivated by him. But, as her diary reveals, she wasn’t alone in feeling that way.
Jim dazzles everyone with his fairy tale about the prince, who is turned into a wolf and must decide whether he will love or kill the one woman who attempts to save him. Fatally, Jim appears to have a lot in common with the prince in the folk tale, which Fiona and her sisters discover at their cost.
Everything works for Mørk in “Darling Jim.” He seduces us with his virtuosity, whether in the guise of Jim, Fiona, or someone else on the page, and also when he lets Niall lead us through the story at a breakneck pace, and with perfect timing. The romantic thrills live and breathe, not the least of which is due to the three sisters.
Because Fiona, Róisín, and Aoife are fascinating, witty, and tough. Fiona is the schoolteacher, whose pert demeanor hides passions that turn into an obsession. Róisín is the lesbian goth, who listens to voices on her shortwave radio, where she refers to herself as Nighwing, and her twin, Aoife, is both resident hippie and Taxi Driver rolled into one. Beneath the original exteriors, Mørk reveals three women, who keep surprising the reader, and make us root for them in the final showdown with Jim and the aunt.
At journey’s end, Niall decides – with a knightly sense of decorum – to tell the three sisters’ story in the form of a graphic novel. I’ll bet it’s going to turn out great, especially since he now knows enough about dangerous wolves to be able to draw them properly. But, in a way, Mørk has beat him to it, because in “Darling Jim,” he paints strong pictures using his words. They burn on the retina.
Mette Strømfeldt, Berlingske Tidende

A chilling bedtime story for adults
People Magazine

Christian Mørk writes seductively... (with) powers of enchantment.
Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

Mørk tightly meshes each separate plot strand - the murders, the diaries and Quick's tales - into an enthralling story that never falters.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A dark, seductive fairy tale of a book. Christian Mørk is a thrilling storyteller...
Gillian Flynn, author of Sharp Objects

Spellbinding...Aglow with fairy-tale inflections, this hypnotic, neo-Gothic suspense story unfolds like a hothouse bloom, lush and pungent; it's a sprig of nightshade, all petals and poison. And it heralds the arrival of an astonishingly gifted storyteller... Sly, wry and utterly original.
Daniel Mallory, The Washington Post