Book review|In the third detective story of the Murhia Pohjanmaalla series, Nilla Kjellsdotter delightfully begins to find her own natural platform.
Novel
Nilla Kjellsdotter: Tills natten är slut. Finnish Anna Heroja. Rubber. 426 pp.
Nilla Kjellsdotter is a very Swedish-sounding name, and the author writes in Swedish. However, Kjellsdotter is Finnish, from the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia, where his books are also set.
Kjellsdotter already made a breakthrough with his first detective story Kivipuisto girlfor which Swedish printers even competed in an auction. Kjellsdotter has become popular both in Sweden and in Finland.
The author’s playing cards are largely based on the tradition of contemporary Swedish detective stories, even so that Murders in Ostrobothnia started the series Kivipuisto girl seemed like a collection of Swedish detective influences thrown together.
In his third detective story A bad night already Kjellsdotter is delightfully starting to find her own natural platform. At its center is Mija Wadö, a police officer working in Vaasa and its surrounding areas, a fragile criminal investigator struggling with her own traumas, who escapes her problems by obsessive work.
The novelty the theme is men who mistreat their wives in various ways. Someone starts murdering such men and dismembering them.
The police are puzzled, because at first there is no connection between the men, and no clues about the murderer. Kjellsdotter keeps the reader a little ahead of the police with the pages that tell about a boy who lived in the midst of domestic violence years ago.
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A kind of today’s Ariadne Oliver, then, this Zarita.
So the reader can quite easily guess why the murders are committed, but of course the murderer’s identity is not revealed until the final climax of the story.
The previous part of the series Heavenly mansion took place in early summer, and A bad night already takes place at the end of the same summer.
Plot is valid and functional, but I wonder why the detective story is so long. All the same could have been fit into a hundred pages shorter book, in which case the story would have been more concise and effective. Now it gets all kinds of stuffing and sometimes even repetitiveness.
An example is the theme of paranoia created by the killer’s complete anonymity, which would have given the book a really tight atmosphere. Now it turns into a bit of a tiff between the policemen as they suspect almost every person they meet of being a murderer based on some theory out of thin air.
It’s already a bad night functional final stages Kjellsdotter builds excitingly, and the surprise that falls into Mija Wadö’s life creates a solid foundation for both her work and her private life in the future of the series.
Although Murders in Ostrobothnia series is about a team of police investigators, Mija Wadö is clearly in the foreground. About the other policemen in the group, only side remarks are thrown about their life situations and family relationships.
And Zarita Roos, a detective writer who started her career at a later age, also appears in the book, who has a cat. Before his work as a writer, Kjellsdotterhan worked as a law office secretary and a truck driver, and he has cats.
Kind of today Agatha Christie Ariadne Oliver, then, this Zarita.
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