The first two volumes of Päivi Alasalmi’s successful audiobook detective series have now also appeared in print.
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Novel
Päivi Alasalmi: Caged birds. Rubber. 334 pp.
Päivi Alasalmen the four-part detective series about crime detective Jarkko Hallavainen was originally published as audiobooks by Storytel. The first two parts of the series Queen of the Underworld and Caged birds are now also available as printed books by Gummerus.
The series is not only about Hallavain, but also about two identical twin sisters who only learn about each other as adults. Among them, Anu Murtovuo is a kind and gentle Therapist, and Karla Kuusivaara, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of her sister: a psychopathic professional criminal and drug user.
They were born to a woman who spent almost her entire life in a mental hospital. Anu has been adopted into a decent orphanage in Oulu, but Karla has spent her childhood in children’s homes, which is partly why Karla hates her better-off sister.
In the Queen of the Underworld Karla kidnapped her sister to get a kidney from her to replace hers, which was destroyed by drugs. It meant nothing to Karla that such a transplant would have meant certain death for Anu, as she had already lost her other kidney in an accident as a child. However, policemen Hallavainen and Sirkiä managed to save Anu and take Karla to prison.
In caged birds A relationship has developed between Anu and Hallavainen, and Karla is sitting in Hämeenlinna’s women’s prison seething with rage. He just wants revenge on his sister and mainly on the whole world.
Hallavainen series the first two parts are like a combination Secrets of life -television series and detective stories, or the love and suspense reading books of newsstand literature from the past. The settings seem clichéd and the whole structure is held up more or less by force. As if the need to continue the story was not due to the story itself at all, but to completely different reasons.
Alasalmi is a writer with a long career and has also worked as a writing teacher and is a recent Finlandia prize nominee. Because Caged birds– the rather low level of the book and its predecessor feels strange.
The book must have been transferred directly from the audiobook to the printed product without further revisions.
Maybe audiobooks are listened to in the same way as radio programs, i.e. with something else on the side, making it so that the concentration is not always at one hundred percent. Then perhaps attention will not be paid to the speediness or illogicality of the story.
In a printed book, everything jumps out much more clearly, because focusing on it requires at least some level of attentiveness.
In caged birds hopping here and there, from Karla’s strangely easy prison escapes to Hallavainen’s confrontation with Somali pirates, and to the romantically depicted relationship of Anu and Hallavainen cuddling. The detective thread about the murder of jealousy that runs as a side plot is, after all, fairly cleverly composed.
However, the threat Anun feels from Karla is the backbone of the story all the time, which is stretched so that the vertebrae crackle.
Correction 22.7. 11:10 a.m.: Removed claim that Dr. Tolonen’s wife and Therapist Raka’s wife are the same person. They are two different people.
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