I came up with The Boy in the Suitcase by Lena Kaaberbel which is also translated and an award winning mystery by an author I’ve never read.  (Yay!). 

The Boy in the Suitcase 
by Lena Kaaberbøl /Agnete Friis 
translated from Danish by Lena Kaaberbøl
2011 / 
Read by Katherine Kellgren 8h 40m
Rating – B+ / crime thriller – Scandi-Noir
(Book 1 in Nina Borg series) 

From the publisher: 
Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is trying to live a quiet life. The last thing her husband wants is for her to go running off on another dangerous mission to help illegal refugees. But when Nina’s estranged friend, Karin, leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, and begs her to take care of its contents, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous case yet. 

Because inside the suitcase is a three-year-old boy: naked and drugged, but alive. Nina’s natural instinct is to rescue the boy, but she knows the situation is risky. Is the boy a victim of child trafficking? Can he be turned over to authorities, or will they only return him to whoever sold him? In an increasingly desperate trek across Denmark, Nina tries to figure out who the boy is, where he belongs, and who exactly is hunting him down. When Karin is discovered brutally murdered, Nina realizes that her life and the boy’s are in jeopardy, too.

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It was difficult for me to get into this thriller because unlike most 1st books in a crime series there isn’t much introductory material re the staples of a US series. That is we’re just dropped into a story, the continuing main characters and their overarching plot. In general, there are plenty of characters and they’re doing rather bizarre things – suspicious sometimes, other times stupid.  So, as rather typical of me, I got about half-way through and realized I was NOT taking this story seriously at all.  And it is serious, in spite of the preposterousness.   

So I started over and found the darkness – scandi-noir published in 2011, right on time. 
Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse in Denmark and the protagonist of this series,  has been asked by Karen, an old, untrustworthy and estranged friend to retrieve a suitcase/backpack from a locker in a train station.  She agrees and is also told to please take care of “it.”  Huh?

Well – surprise, Nina!  It’s a large suitcase with a small and very sleepy (drugged?) boy but otherwise he seems unharmed. It turns out he’s 3 years old boy and yes, has been drugged. Nina kind of panics out what she should do next, and so the fun begins, but then it turns real. Is this custody rights or one of those child trafficking cases where the victim is never found?  So now Nina goes to find her friend and there she is – dead in her home – apparently murdered. 

Meanwhile the boy’s mother is also frantic to get her baby back because it was not his father who picked him up! 

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lene-kaaberbol/boy-suitcase/