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A review by ridgewaygirl
My First Murder by Leena Lehtolainen
2.0
I like Scandinavian crime novels. The setting and the writing style enhance the genre, and the books that get translated into English are usually good. Of course, now so much is being published that I've also come across a few written and plotted just as sloppily as the worst mass market fiction produced here.
This is the first installment in a Finnish series by Leena Lehtolainen. In it, Maria Kallio is a reluctant homicide detective, having switched to policing partway through a law degree and contemplating returning to it. She's put in charge of what looks to be a fairly simple case when her immediate boss is off work and not due to return soon. Some members of a student choir group went off to spend a weekend together at a summer house and in the morning one of their number is found dead at the edge of the water. Somewhat differently than the usual Scandinavian crime novel, My First Murder is set up like a classic British detective story with a clear group of suspects gathered together in one place. While they do all return to Helsinki, the suspect pool is finite and Kallio is left to discover who the murderer is almost entirely on her own, which of course she does.
I'll confess right here that I find authors like [[Agatha Christie]] boring. I appreciate that they laid the building blocks for the modern crime novel, but I don't find the structure all that interesting. Lehtolainen does an adequate job and her protagonist is likable, if not always believable, but I doubt I'll read any more by her. Incidentally, this structure was used more successfully by another Scandinavian author,
Anne Holt, in 1222.
This is the first installment in a Finnish series by Leena Lehtolainen. In it, Maria Kallio is a reluctant homicide detective, having switched to policing partway through a law degree and contemplating returning to it. She's put in charge of what looks to be a fairly simple case when her immediate boss is off work and not due to return soon. Some members of a student choir group went off to spend a weekend together at a summer house and in the morning one of their number is found dead at the edge of the water. Somewhat differently than the usual Scandinavian crime novel, My First Murder is set up like a classic British detective story with a clear group of suspects gathered together in one place. While they do all return to Helsinki, the suspect pool is finite and Kallio is left to discover who the murderer is almost entirely on her own, which of course she does.
I'll confess right here that I find authors like [[Agatha Christie]] boring. I appreciate that they laid the building blocks for the modern crime novel, but I don't find the structure all that interesting. Lehtolainen does an adequate job and her protagonist is likable, if not always believable, but I doubt I'll read any more by her. Incidentally, this structure was used more successfully by another Scandinavian author,
Anne Holt, in 1222.