NVK, which is the IATA (International Air Transport Association) code for Narvik’s old airport, is in this instance Naemi Vieno Kuusela, a Finnish femme fatale whom we first meet in this novel in North Karelia in 1579 and later in the company of Zhang Guo Xing, a wealthy Chinese businessman, in a Shanghai nightclub in 2012. This surely offers a clue about her. But, as she says on page 118:
You think you know what I am. You have no idea. I’m not in any of your books. You try to catch me. Your hands grasp empty air. I’m not a story you can tell.
That doesn’t sound like a promising basis for a novel, but its author gives it a go. Unlike NVK, we know at least who he is, because the biographical note declares that Temple Drake is ‘the pen-name of acclaimed author Rupert Thomson’.
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