Jan Costin Wagner’s new Kimmo Joentaa novel is a highly suspenseful and deeply intense elegy to death in a world that has gone off the rails.
It’s early May in the Finnish city of Turku and the last snow is falling. Kimmo Joentaa receives not just one, but two calls: the first to the scene of an accident, where a stranger has run over and killed an eleven-year-old, and the second to a crime scene, where two unidentified bodies lie dead on a park bench as though they were asleep. Kimmo Joentaa becomes a companion in mourning for the father of the girl killed in the accident, while simultaneously trying to get to the bottom of both the hit-and-run and double murder.
The investigation involves Joentaa in a ruinous web of relationships that has fatefully brought together people who originally had nothing to do with one another: an architect who loses his solid faith in life’s symmetry, a student inexorably headed towards a rampage, a young woman trying to escape from poverty, and an investment banker who gets lost in the thicket of his double life.
When Kimmo Joentaa finally begins to connect the dots that link these individuals to each other, it’s almost too late. And it is only then that he realizes that his greatest task is not the search for a double murderer, but one that still lies ahead of him.
“So laconic, so rhythmic, so beautiful. That’s love at first sentence.” –Tobias Becker/Spiegel online (on Das Licht in einem dunklen Haus)
