Helsinki White

January 16, 2012
Racial hatred drives Thompson’s explosive third thriller featuring Insp. Kari Vaara (after 2011’s Lucifer’s Tears). When Finland’s national chief of police asks Kari to head a covert team to fight organized crime by hijacking buys and planting drugs and guns on rival dealers, all allegedly to help clean up Helsinki, Kari realizes that he’d be complicit in corruption, as the money collected would not only fund the operation but also funnel back up the chain of command. Kari’s American wife, Kate, understands the implicit risks, but doesn’t immediately object. Flawed team members include his eager-beaver partner, Milo Nieminien, and the imposing but naïve Sulo “Sweetness” Polvinen. The murder of the minister of immigration, Lisbet Söderlund, whose head is sent by mail to the Finnish Somalia Network with a note denouncing her pro-immigration stance, raises the ante. A race war threatens, with the right-wing Real Finns Party fanning the flames. Thompson deftly explores moral gray areas in this all too topical novel. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

February 15, 2012
Finland's top cop gets to run his very own black-ops unit--and rue the day he ever took what looked like a dream job. Desperate to hide the ultra-compromising video Inspector Kari Vaara has of him, Jyri Ivalo, Finland's national chief of police, offers him a free hand assembling a dream team, financed by whatever it can steal from the bad guys, to go after international traffickers in human flesh. Determined "to help people" now that he's a new father, Kari (Lucifer's Tears, 2011, etc.) brings in his loose-cannon partner Milo Nieminien and his protege Sulo (Sweetness) Polvinen and hits the bricks. Their first few forays, informed by intel from Ivalo, net them some fast cash, some sweet bonuses and the opportunity to mingle with some highly placed politicians and financiers. Despite the sweet smell of success, however, Kari and his mates, dirty cops in all but name, are already getting sucked into a cesspool of corruption. Ironically, the tipping point comes with the order to close a pair of high-profile cases that even the cleanest cops would be proud to investigate: the recent beheading of pro-immigration activist Lisbet Soderlund and the year-old kidnapping of Antti and Kaarina Saukko, son and daughter of megalomaniac industrialist Veikko Saukko, and Kaarina's murder three days after she was ransomed and returned unharmed. Joining forces with highly questionable French police officer Adrien Moreau to turn over the appropriate rocks, Kari finds himself swiftly borne into the heart of anti-immigration darkness and unable to recognize or accept the person he's turning into. Enough violent felonies for a Sunday newspaper--and, as a depressingly informative epilogue intimates, that's exactly where they've come from.

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February 1, 2012

After the decapitated head of Finland's top minority-rights crusader arrives at the offices of an immigrant political group, the country erupts in racial violence. Inspector Kari Vaara is tapped to lead the investigation, despite being compromised on several counts--he's a new father, a recent surgery to remove a benign brain tumor has left him incapable of feeling emotion, and he's up to his neck in corruption, leading a rogue black-ops group that steals drugs, guns, and money from criminals. With the help of a Finnish-born former French Legionnaire-turned-spy (!), Vaara and his team connect the dots between the murder and an unsolved kidnapping, a discovery that imperils the cop and his family. VERDICT In his third Vaara thriller (after Lucifer's Tears), Thompson adeptly conveys the ugliness of the racial intolerance currently permeating Western Europe. Less successful is the cartoony covert-ops angle (think Stieg Larsson meets The A-Team) and the choice to strip Vaara of his conscience. Crime fiction readers with a taste for Nordic ultraviolence will be satisfied, but those yearning for less gore and more depth will be left cold.--Annabelle Mortensen, Skokie P.L., IL

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2012
This was one of the first Scandinavian crime novels to be published after Norwegian Anders Breivik's shooting spree at a youth camp in 2011, which resulted in 69 deaths, and in that context, the novel's themes of hate, racism, and politics ring especially true. After brain surgery and the birth of his daughter, Inspector Kari Vaara returns to work, running his new and illegally funded black-ops unit out of his apartment. Working with the large and terrifying Sweetness, and the brilliant but sociopathic hacker Milo, Kari is tasked with an actual murder case, the death of an immigrant-rights advocate after his highly successful campaign against illegal drugs helps dry out Helsinki. Their investigation attracts the attention of some rather dubious characters, including Moreau, who claims to be an expat Finn returned to the home country after years in the French Foreign Legion. Bearing gifts of fresh, uncut heroin from Afghanistan, Moreau joins Kari, Milo, and Sweetness, providing them with weapons training as well as an entree into the international underworld. As the case takes Kari higher and higher into Finnish government, he realizes that, in order to survive, he must not only take money from drug dealers but also gather dirt on those above him. A must-read for fans of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)