This is the first in a long-running series of Finnish crime novels featuring Detective Maria Kallio, which is now running at a dozen or so, with 11 of them translated into English so far. As a fan of scandi-crime, I'd been curious about them for a while, so when the Kindle Store suddenly had them on sale for the ridiculous price of 99c each, I bought every single one...
 
My first impressions are not to be overwhelmingly impressed. There are some very strong points. It's good to have a protagonist who isn't a middle-aged alcoholic male walking disaster (the standard scandi-noir hero) - and in fact, in a nice twist in this one, it's Maria's (largely absent) boss who fills this role and you have no sympathy for him at all, especially once he returns from his absence to royally mess things up at the last. At the same time, Maria isn't an overdrawn hyper-competant retort to all that. She's intelligent enough, fit enough, good-looking enough and so on, but is remarkable in her job largely only because she's the only woman, and that situation isn't really too her liking. She's only working for the police supposedly temporarily after having left to pursue a law degree. The novel also doesn't dwell overly on the violence in the way that some of the darker Scandanavian crime novels do.
 
This story finds her having to deal with the suspected murder of a member of a local choral society, a handsome and charming lothario, who any number of rivals, husbands and spurned lovers might have wanted to kill. The slight complicating factor is that Maria used to hang out with this crowd while she was at university and there are all kinds of unresolved feelings hanging around the case.
 
The less impressive aspect is simply the plotting. The story is straight, too straight. With the exception of the prologue where the body is found, it's all written from a very simple Maria-centred viewpoint. There aren't really any serious twists or red herrings or major diversions. The investigation just proceeds, interrupted, but not diverted, by a little bit of drinking and self-doubt, towards its conclusion.
 
 The Helsinki atmosphere is good enough, although the city does not, at least in this first novel, emerge as a character as strongly or distinctively as the Stockholm of Martin Beck, the Edinburgh of Rebus, or the Bergen of Varg Veum. This vagueness is partly reflective of the somewhat indistinct character of Detection Kallio. Maybe she's just young, but while there are some gesturing at social justice, there's little in the way of political critique (again as in the Beck novels) or a really powerful depiction of social reality. And above all, if you had told me this novel was written by a man, I wouldn't have disagreed - there's actually very little about Maria Kallio that suggests a distinctive women's view, with the exeption perhaps of a short side case to do with a serial park rapist - and even that seems remarkably blasé. Those Finns, eh?
 
 Because first novels are often far less impressive than those that follow, and characters grow and become more interesting as stories progress, I'm going to continue with these. This first one really wasn't bad at all, just relatively unremarkable in a very crowded field.