Category Archives: Finland

Review: NIGHTS OF AWE by Harri Nykänen

Posted on by
10

In Helsinki the bodies of two Arab men are found, one presumably tortured before being shot and the other having fallen or been pushed from a bridge onto railway tracks. Detective Ariel Kafka of the Violent Crimes Unit, and one of only two Jewish policemen in Finland, is the lead investigator. The bodies are quickly identified and at first police wonder if the crimes are race related but, as more bodies start piling up and the security forces start poking their noses in where Kafka doesn’t want them, consideration turns to a possible terrorist attack being planned for Helsinki. Then again it could be a drug thing!

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Ariel Kafka who is around 40, single and, mostly, unobservant of his religion’s traditions and rules. Refreshingly he is not a maverick, a loner or an alcoholic and yet he still manages to be interesting. He does have a family tragedy in his past but it does not cripple him and he rubs along well enough with his older brother while having a quite lovely relationship with his uncle. His working relationships are not beset by conflict either. He manages to get on with most of his superiors, even acknowledging the political fallout they try to save him from, and his colleagues are generally energetic and competent, though one is more interested in his hobby than his work but even he manages to help track down a vital piece of evidence when it really matters. Kafka can be a bit acerbic but his dry humour is a nice counter balance and overall he is the sort of character I can imagine as a real-world policeman which is not something I often think about fictional detectives.

The plot was a less successful element of the book for me, feeling a bit more like a Hollywood thriller script than a considered work of crime fiction. The speed with which conspiracy theories were dreamt up, bought into and abandoned in favour of a new one wasn’t really convincing. And when combined with the alarming body count (eight I think by the end of the book) I did start to roll my eyes a bit. For me the fact of Kafka’s Jewishness and the setting of the book during the ten-day period between two of the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, was enough to give the book the unique flavour I suspect the author was aiming for. Adding a thread about Mossad agents working in-country was a little over the top (most Jewish people I know seem to manage to get through entire days, weeks even, without encountering a single reference to the famed Agency so it kind of bugs me when every fictional Jew runs across at least one agent before breakfast).

However there is enough promise in this series opener for me to be keen to read the next instalment should there be one. The protagonist offers scope for genuinely interesting character development and there is evidence that Nykänen has the capacity to explore social themes in an intelligent way, even if in this book such exploration got a bit lost at times amidst the overly convoluted plot. For example Nykänen tackles the difficult issue of the way Israel and the broader Israeli/Palestinian conflict is perceived in Finland and Europe generally and he does so thoughtfully. NIGHTS OF AWE, a title with a clever double meaning, is a smoothly translated, smart, fast-paced read with enough depth that I could largely forgive the unnecessary ‘Hollywoodisation’ of the plot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

NIGHTS OF AWE has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Kristian London
Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [2012]
ISBN 9781904738923
Length 252 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in Ariel Kafka series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: Snow Angels by James Thompson

Posted on by
7

This is the fifth of six books I need to read to complete the Scandinavian Reading Challenge and is the only one set in Finland.

If there is a Kittilä Tourism Authority I’m guessing James Thompson isn’t on their Christmas card list. In Snow Angels, part police procedural and part observation on Finnish culture and traditions, he has painted a unflattering portrait of the winter holiday resort in the northern part of the country. Against the backdrop of the investigation of a brutal crime Thompson shows us a country with one of the world’s highest suicide rates, where alcoholism is prevalent and resentment and abuse of foreigners is if not universal then fairly widespread. If that were all he showed then the book wouldn’t be much of a read but, using knowledge and experiences gained during his ten years living there, Thompson, who is American by birth, also depicts some of the subtleties of the culture which help to explain why people act the way they do. He also highlights some positive things like the community’s practical and drug-free way of dealing with a resident with mental health issues. For me this exploration of the customs and cultures of the region was the most successful aspect of the book.

The crime in question is the murder and disfigurement of a beautiful Somali immigrant, Sufia Elmi, who had gained some fame as an actress in her adopted country. It is an uncommon crime but Inspector Kari Vaara is confident he can solve it. When evidence points to the new lover of his ex-wife as the murderer things do start to get complicated for Vaara and the investigation spirals out of control fairly early on. At one point Vaara seemed to be following a logical, evidence-based trail but then story then morphed into pondering his series of weird and wacky theories, based more on guesswork than facts. I think this loss of plot strength stemmed from the first-person point of view in which the whole story is told. This POV also provided for some clunky exposition which would have been far more smoothly integrated in a third-person story.

The characters in Snow Angels go a fair way towards making up for the plot problems though. Kari is hiding some demons of his own but not to the point of being a hopeless alcoholic like so many of his fellow fictional detectives. His new marriage to an American woman is portrayed believably, with her difficulties in adapting to the country being thoughtfully depicted. Having once had to go to hospital in a country where I didn’t speak the language I could entirely identify with Kate’s fears and frustration at the way she perceived her treatment in such a circumstance. Most of the minor characters, like the succession of truly horrid people inhabiting Sufia Elmi’s life and Kari’s fellow police officer Valtteri, are also credible even if some of them are abhorrent. I do agree with Maxine at Petrona though that the victim is never really fully fleshed out so it was difficult to become wholly absorbed by finding out what happened to her. The book could have spent less time repeating the horrible mutilations done to her and more time letting us get to know her back story and how she ended up in such horrid circumstances.

Reading this book made me think about the impact of the author’s perspective on storytelling as it’s the only one of the books I’ve read for this challenge written by someone who isn’t Scandinavian by birth. It’ fairly common to read books by ‘outsiders’ set in the US or UK or even Australia but to come across a non-local but knowledgeable perspective of a fairly closed society like this one is fascinating. Overall I enjoyed the read and could forgive some of the plot problems of the debut novel because the setting and characterisations were well realised and I will happily read another story in which they feature. Though I’ll hope it’s summer time and the poor folk get a bit of sunlight in their lives.

Snow Angels has been reviewed at DJ’s Krimiblog, Material Witness and Petrona

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3/5
Publisher Putnam [2010]
ISBN 9780399156175
Length 264 pages
Format Uncorrected Bound Proof
Source my collection (bookmooch)