James Thompson - Snow Angels

review by Brian Lowen on show 19th Jan
When a beautiful Somali immigrant film star is found dead – her body gruesomely mutilated – small town detective Kari Vaara fears that exposure to the media will send shockwaves through Finland.

Haunted by his past, the investigation begins to take its toll on Vaara and his American wife, Kate. Pregnant with their first child, she is struggling with the Finnish culture of silence and isolation.

Things get too close for comfort when the chief suspect turns out to be someone Vaara would rather forget – his first wife.

The investigation plods along in this small town in northern Finland where the sun doesn’t rise for six months of the year and people tend to become very insular – the extreme cold keeping people indoors, where we are given the impression that they remain in an alcoholic stupor most of the time.

You get some idea what it must be like living there when Vaara checking the thermometer one morning says “O good, it’s warming up, the temperature is only -32 degrees!”

The bodies keep piling up as Vaara struggles to solve the case which at times tends to get rather complicated, especially with all the unpronounceable Finnish names.
I found the ending rather unbelievable and not true to the character of Vaara who seems quite a ‘by the book’ type cop.

Interesting to learn about the way of life in this northern country but I did not enjoy it and was glad when I got to the end of the book.