Jan Costin Wagner is a German crime writer who has set his novels in Finland and this novel is one in a series that feature the policeman Kimmo Joenta.
This was the first book I've read by this Author and I'm a big fan of Swedish crime so I thought I would try something else in the Nordic crime genre. Kimmo Joenta is the main policeman in the story and as well as discovering the murderer, Kimmo is also struggling with the woman who walked out on him, who has no name. This thread turned out to be a very small sub plot, but was made out to be a big deal in the first couple of chapters.
The different names of all the characters were very hard to follow, partly because they were foreign names and partly because there were so many different ones. Because of this, I did lose the plot a bit at times and forgot which character had done what.
Overall I liked this book. The plot and the murders were interesting and there was definitely a mystery surrounding the deaths which made me read on to try and find out what was going on. However, I think that it could have been made more simple, with less sub plots and descriptions, as many of these were never followed up on or completed. There were also too many characters and half of them could have been left out - unless this was just me getting lost in them all, but I do think the same could have been done with a lot less characters.
For me, the ending was a bit of an anti-climax as well. The mystery of the murders was slowly unravelled over the last quarter of the book and then just kind of came to an end and stopped. There was no unexpected twist and no cliff hanger.
I would recommend this book to those readers who are crime fans and who like Swedish or Nordic crime, although I don't think I will be reading this again. I would describe it as a 'nice' crime story because there weren't any brutal murders or twists and it just kind of told a story and then ended.
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