Books and Chat

Snow Angels - by James Thompson
 
This is the first book in a new series by James Thompson and I for one couldn’t be happier.  This series is set in Finland and admittedly for me, a heretofore undiscovered country.  (At least as far as my fictional reading goes!)

 Days before Christmas a beautiful Somali film star of B type movies, is found horribly murdered and mutilated in a snowfield not far from where Detective Vaara met his lovely American wife, his second wife to be exact.  Sufia Elmi has been mutilated, sexually used and tortured, in a way that suggests a resemblance to an old unsolved American murder.  With the evidence the detective has at the moment, it could be a racially motivated hate crime, a serial murder or something altogether different.   The author makes us understand that in the “land of the rising sun”,   many people tend to be alcoholics to cope with the weather and endless nights and somewhat prejudiced.  What a fine cast of characters, each one finely and deeply written; even the secondary characters.

 
This is a police procedural/hard core mystery at its finest.   It’s gritty, sexual, graphic, realistic, vivid, frightening, shocking, and very, very different from what readers of mysteries and police procedurals written by USA or UK authors teach us. This was a book that has to be read in one sitting and it can be.  It will pull and suck you in from the very first chapter and won’t let you go until you‘ve finished.  I love the fact that for once a writer didn’t seem to rely on red-herrings to keep the reader wondering.  For Mr. Thompson the truth was enough to keep me guessing and trying to solve this murder.  I love the underlying story of Vaara’s relationship with his wife Kate and how she is dealing with making a permanent move to this highly unusual (for an America) country .