Culture|Book review
The opening work of the entire series takes place in Ostrobothnia.
Novel
Nilla Kjellsdotter: Girl in the Stone Park (Flickan i Stenparken). Finnish Anna Heroja. Rubber. 351 pp.
Kivipuisto girl is originally written in Swedish and first published in Sweden. Still, it’s a Finnish detective story, set in the Swedish-speaking region of Ostrobothnia around Vaasa.
However, it is easy to understand why Swedish publishers competed for the book and why it was first published in Sweden. Lives in Oravain Nilla Kjellsdotter (b. 1987) has actually read closely his professional sisters across the bay and seems to know what kind of detective work in Sweden.
The main character can preferably be a young female police officer with a traumatic past and difficulties in maintaining relationships. Professionally, he must be smart, competent and unyielding. And the investigated crime should have connections with the main character’s life.
It is good for our police officers to have understanding and loyal colleagues and friends around them, who are more grounded and in harmony with their environment than they are.
All of this suits Kjellsdotter’s main character, 36-year-old Mija Wadö, who works in the Vaasa police.
The crime plot begins about when a scantily clad teenage girl is found in her spirits on a winter evening in Oravainen’s Kivipuisto. The girl is unable to tell herself who she is and what has happened to her. Or where he has come to Kivipuisto.
Soon, the famous diabetes researcher David Heselius is found murdered in a cozy detached house.
No decent leads can be found in either case, so the police have to grope in the dark for a long time. Until a veteran police officer finds a connecting factor in a disappearance that happened years ago.
The wife and daughter of David Heselius’ Krister brother had disappeared, and later word had come to them of a sudden move to Spain. But had they ever gone to Spain?
Mija Wadö and her co-workers begin to dig deeper into the Heselius affairs. Soon they find something so gruesome it’s hard to imagine.
Kivipuisto girl is the first detective story and the beginning of the Murders in Pohjanmaalla series, so basically fresh stuff. Still, it is burdened by the same thing as many Swedish detectives today.
Although the plot in itself flows well, the book feels routine, as if going through a ready-made formula. The crime and the criminal are gruesome, but for the sake of gruesomeness alone, without any deeper perspective.
This will do About the girl from Kivipuisto smooth intermediate level, where deepening is replaced by explanation, in some places repetition of things. As a detective story, there is no real major flaw in the novel, but nothing special either.
The holiday of the crime plot follows things that happened a long time ago in the life of an unnamed young girl. However, it doesn’t take long before the reader figures out who the girl is.
Perhaps the Finnish detective market is gradually beginning to suffer from the same problem as the Swedish ones. The field is already so full of templates that truly innovative and personal novelties are starting to be rare.
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