How I invented a protagonist with a secret first name and why it’s finally time to reveal it

You’re ready to write your hopefully bestselling crime series, and have a great setting and some nail-biting plots, but what are you going to call your lead character?
It must be memorable, pronounceable in several languages and something you won’t get sick of typing as you have ideas enough to last at least ten books.
Oh and all the great names – Reacher, Morse, Rebus, Miss Marple – are already taken.
Five years ago, when faced with that challenge, I opted for Jensen, giving the first book in my series a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title.
In My Name is Jensen (2021), newspaper journalist Jensen, announces her arrival on the crime scene when she finds the body of a young man buried in the snow on her way to work.
According to official statistics, 218,886 Danes share the surname Jensen. Given that there are only around six million of us, that makes Jensen very common indeed.
To my mind, this was fitting for a character who was born in Denmark (like me) but has now returned after many years abroad (unlike me).
Lonely, discombobulated and finding Copenhagen darker than she remembers it, Jensen has cause to question just how Danish she is as she leads us deep into the back streets of the capital.
We see Copenhagen through her eyes, as if she is a stranger discovering it for the first time.
And wouldn’t it be good – I thought, as I came up with her name in 2021 – if Jensen had a first name that she preferred not to use, because she found it, frankly, ridiculous?
This would be my homage to Inspector Morse, the creation of Colin Dexter whose wonderful Oxford series made me fall in love with the genre in my early youth.
It turns out that if you call yourself Jensen, and just that, most people will assume you’re a man, which I thought was funny and actually quite thought-provoking.
Throughout the series, this case of mistaken identity has happened to Jensen many times, and not always to her disadvantage as criminals tend to be thrown when she turns up – a slight, short woman with gappy teeth and a persistent line of questioning.
There’s another upside being called something so plainly ordinary in the country where you live: no one – and I mean absolutely not a single person – can find you online.
Jensen is private person and bad people frequently come after her, so this is ideal.
The anonymity of her name is also in many ways symbolic of a certain vagueness when it comes to her past.
Born in the late 1980s, Jensen has no idea who her father is; her mother, Marion, insists she doesn’t know, but why is she so cagey about it?
And why did she give her daughter such an (allegedly), unusual first name?
Jensen was born curious. She left school at sixteen and got a job at a local newspaper, quickly impressing the editor of Dagbladet, a big, if struggling, broadsheet in Copenhagen. So much so that they made her a foreign correspondent.
After fifteen years abroad, however, Jensen is now home and keener than ever to find out who she really is and where she comes from.
Throughout book two, three and four – The Girl in the Photo (2023), Back from the Dead (2024) and Out of the Dark (2025) – Jensen gets progressively closer to the truth, and by the time we catch up with her in the fifth and latest book, The Woman in The Wall (2026), she seems to have arrived at it.
Or has she?
Celebrated fantasy author Valde Brix does claim to be her father, but can Jensen trust him?
After all, Brix has an ulterior motive: he wants Jensen to use her sleuthing skills to find the stalker who is threatening to ruin his life.
Meanwhile, human remains have turned up behind an apartment wall in the middle of Copenhagen, and Jensen’s former lover, DI Henrik Jungersen, knows he is hunting for killer who has been hiding in plain sight.
Later, when a woman connected to Brix turns up brutally murdered, Jensen and her teenage apprentice Gustav become embroiled in Henrik’s investigation.
It becomes clear that the stalker won’t stop, until Brix is destroyed, and Jensen realises with growing horror that her loved ones are in mortal danger.
As bodies pile up and the stalker closes in, Jensen races to uncover a truth so devastating it will shatter everything she thought she knew about family, trust, and survival.
Jensen has always felt distant from her mother, Marion, a reclusive artist living in deepest, darkest North Jutland, as far away from Copenhagen as it is possible to get.
Now, their relationship takes centre stage and, when Jensen finally discovers what Marion has been running from, it’s all the more poignant because Jensen has just had a daughter herself.
Five books in, the first name she has hated for so long suddenly makes perfect sense.
And that name is (drumroll) …
No, I can’t tell you, without spoiling the plot. You will just have to read the book for yourself.

Heidi Amsinck is the bestselling author of the Jensen series, set in Copenhagen. The fifth book is
The Woman in the Wall, (Muswell Press, 23 April 2026)