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

Right off the top I'm going to tell you that I am NOT a professional reviewer. I'm just an average person that adores books of all kinds.  Some of my favorites are in the speculative fiction category and this is why I chose this novel to review.


This is a book that has one foot in the fantasy genre and one foot in romance, and doesn’t know which way to jump.  This is quite an original story with a very unusual setting.  St. Hauda’s, a series of islets and islands that seem very remote and isolated from the rest of the modern, but really isn’t. Fantastical things can and do happen in this place. I’m not sure what the author wants us to think of St. Hauda’s, is it a world of pure fantasy so that we can drop our pre-conceived expectations?  Is it a land that is as modern as most outlying areas that are slightly isolated from the rest of the world, sort of backwards but with feet firmly entrenched in the 21 century?  The world is very confusing and frustrating.