Silence

October 24, 2011
Heavy on Nordic melancholy, Wagner’s slow-burning second novel featuring Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa (after 2007’s Ice Moon) focuses on a possible link between a cold case and a present-day crime. In 1974, the body of 13-year-old Pia Lehtinen, who disappeared while riding her bike in Turku, was found after several months in a lake. Now another girl, 14-year-old Sinikka Vehkasalo, has gone missing, her bike and sports bag found near a cross erected in Pia’s memory. Joentaa and his team soon exhaust their scant leads and turn, unofficially, for advice to a recently retired police colleague, who’s convinced it’s the work of the same killer. Meanwhile, scenes from the life of Helsinki estate agent Timo Korvensuo, whose connection to Pia’s death—and potentially Sinikka’s vanishing—unspools at a leisurely pace. An unexpected conclusion helps compensate for the sometimes saggy plot, while Wagner’s take on grief seen through the dual prisms of time and circumstance will resonate with many readers.

November 1, 2011
Now widowed of the beloved helpmeet who was dying in Ice Moon (2007), detective Kimmo Joentaa, of the Turko CID, grapples with a second, equally chilling case. It's been 33 years since Pia Lehtinen was raped and murdered. Her killer was never found--only her bicycle, abandoned at the side of a cycle path, and her corpse, recovered weeks later from a nearby lake. Now, Sinikka Vehkasalo, another teenager, has disappeared, her bicycle found in the place of the memorial marking the earlier unsolved crime. Is this new crime the work of a copycat, or has the original killer been driven to repeat his crime a generation later? The case falls to phlegmatic, reflective Joentaa, but he'd rather share it with Antsi Ketola, whose retirement has removed from the force its last veteran with firsthand knowledge of the Lehtinen case. Pia's killer, quickly revealed as now-elderly caretaker Olavi Pärssinen, remains a minor figure; instead, the story focuses on his accomplice, real-estate agent Timo Korvensuo, bringing you so close to this sorry specimen that you feel trapped inside his head. As Joentaa and Ketola do their best to deal with Sinikka's troubled parents and unearth traces of a third similar disappearance a mere 24 years back, Wagner slowly brings Timo's combination of guilt, denial, passivity and enjoyment of his perfectly normal family to a boil. What is it about those Scandinavians? Though Wagner's cops get along equably enough, there's precious little oxygen between the other characters, who seem to be carrying all the torment his striking debut reserved for the hero.

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