Helpful Score: 1
A few decades ago, Ross MacDonald wrote about very grim murders in the La-La Land of Southern California. His protagonist, Lew Archer, a cynical direct descendent of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, usually unhinged a pile of human evil that spilled out all over the pages, like a locked closet filled with the old bones of corpses, finally opened. Archer never solved crimes, he was a indomitable meddler, opening locked closets. Before the last page, one murder would be followed, deus ex machina, by several more, and the scales would wobble back into some uneasy balance. The gruesome remains of dead and survivors, and the chaos of the human condition were scattered around the last scene, like some multi-car pile-up with fatalities, passing outside our windows, as we roll on.
If Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer were a police inspector in rural Finland, above the Arctic Circle, facing a hideous murder with ties to a Hollywood slaying from long, long ago, Archer would recognize James Thompson's Inspector Kari Vaara and his methods of investigation. Vaara has all the CSI forensic technologies Archer never dreamed of, but they don't really help. Like crimes from La-La Land, murder in the long night of total Arctic darkness is really about those closets of sin, evil, and human darkness, and Vaara and Archer know there is really no solving the puzzles of the darkest closets of psyche and soul. You just have to let the light in.
You cannot ask for a better first novel than Thompson's "Snow Angels" and you will not want to let his hero, Inspector Kari Vaara, rest on his well-deserved laurels. Like the "Snow Angels" case, you know the next will have no angels, and the toll will be just as ugly as that mangled pile-up Vaara left behind in this case.
But you just can't wait.
Ross, Lew, reader; welcome to Finland.
If Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer were a police inspector in rural Finland, above the Arctic Circle, facing a hideous murder with ties to a Hollywood slaying from long, long ago, Archer would recognize James Thompson's Inspector Kari Vaara and his methods of investigation. Vaara has all the CSI forensic technologies Archer never dreamed of, but they don't really help. Like crimes from La-La Land, murder in the long night of total Arctic darkness is really about those closets of sin, evil, and human darkness, and Vaara and Archer know there is really no solving the puzzles of the darkest closets of psyche and soul. You just have to let the light in.
You cannot ask for a better first novel than Thompson's "Snow Angels" and you will not want to let his hero, Inspector Kari Vaara, rest on his well-deserved laurels. Like the "Snow Angels" case, you know the next will have no angels, and the toll will be just as ugly as that mangled pile-up Vaara left behind in this case.
But you just can't wait.
Ross, Lew, reader; welcome to Finland.
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