The series continues after Book 1, as a straight-down-the-line crime series in many ways, although it takes a while to settle, like Maria herself. From being a part-time police officer in Helsinki in Book 1, she moves through being a lawyer in a small-town firm in Book 2, to being the local Sheriff in her (even smaller) hometown in the dreary ex-idustrial of Finland in Book 3 to (finally?) in Book 4 and 5, settling down to a longer-term job as a police detective in Espoo, a municipality next to Helsinki of which the small town in Book 2 is also part. In Book 2 and 3, you almost get the feeling, as people she knows always seem to get killed, that this might end up being like a Finnish version of Murder, She Wrote, but by Book 4, this seems to have been abandoned. It might not be so much Maria who has settled down, as Leena Lehtolainen.
 
 Maria's character definitely starts to become more defined too. She's fierce and impulsive and a little careless of her own safety sometimes, but perceptive and caring for the safety of other's. Like almost everyone in Finland it seems from these books, she is super-fit and loves the countryside and the lakes and sea. Her relationship with her partner, an old friend who she reconnected with in Book 1, goes from being difficult to being increasingly loving and necessary to both. It's actually good to see an uncomplicated relationship painted well. Her relationship with her colleagues and her struggles as a female officer in the face general arseholery are well done. There is a lot more social observation in these books too, with class and racial tensions playing important roles in both the background and increasingly in the foreground too.
 
 As I said though, these are still pretty much straight-ahead: everything is always seen through Maria's eyes, with the occasional exception of a prologue; there is a murder and while initially baffled or even misled, the plot proceeds to the resolution. In a couple of the books, almost exactly the same thing happens, which is that Maria tells us that she has worked out who the killer is but then doesn't tell us the name as she proceeds onwards, which just reads weirdly when you are supposed to be 'in her head'. It breaks the atmosphere and the link we have to the character. There are better ways of doing this. Another one: we know the author is a huge figure-skating fan and even writes about it for newspapers. In Book 5, she suddenly makes Maria a bit of a figure-skating fan out of nowhere, solely for the sake of the plot, which concerns the death of a promising teenage skater - I think skating was mentioned once before in the entire series to this point.