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Helsinki Homicide: Darling

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I haven't read all of Jarkko Sipila's Helsinki Homicide series, but the current one (Darling, translated ably by Katriina Kitchens) is focused less on  Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamӓki than on his team (in comparison to the ones I have read). The result is very good, right up to the end (which I found a bit rushed and a bit more brutal in a casual way than anything that had come before). I kept thinking of Ed McBain and the 87th Precinct books, in the way that Sipila handles the shifting point of view and the broadened focus on the characters. The cops are interesting and well differentiated from one another, and along the way another interesting character, defense attorney Nea Lind, also becomes an important aspect of the story. The plotting is also off-beat in an interesting way. When a mentally handicapped adult woman is found dead, the police focus in on a group of men (including the caretaker in her apartment building) who hang out together in the Alamo Bar; each in turn...
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A detective's beginnings

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Cara Black's Aimée Leduc series has delivered, in 15 volumes, interesting characters, enticing views of Paris, intricate plots, and thrilling conclusions. In the 16th, Murder on the Quai, she delivers all that plus Aimee's "foundation myth," the story of the origins of her profession, her partner Rene, her dog Miles Davis, and her fraught family history--plus the wartime resistance, Nazi gold, and more. Aimée makes a charming gamine-detective, just at the beginning of developing her skills as a detective. We also see her father firsthand, and get a glimpse of the story of his death, frequently referred to in the series. Plus we get a brief glimpse of Aimée's mother, also a frequent source of internal conflict for the detective throughout the series. But in all cases, the shift in perspective from the recent past (all the Leduc stories are set some 10 years or so before their publication date, giving the key source of her detective agency's income, data protect...
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Stuart Neville, Those We Left Behind

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--> [Since the reviews I published at the late, lamented site The Life Sentence, edited by Lisa Levy, are no longer on-line, I've decided to republish a few of them here. Here's the first one; I posted here a review of Neville's next novel, a sequel to Those We Left Behind, and it appears below.]   Stuart Neville is one of the most distinctive of the new crime writers from Ireland and Northern Ireland. His debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (2009), was a sort-of ghost story, featuring a former Republican hitman, Gerry Fagan, who is haunted by the 12 victims of his own political killings. In the UK, the novel was released as The Twelve — perhaps the memory of Britain’s own ghosts of Belfast dictated the change. Neville is among several current crime writers (Deon Meyer and Tana French, for instance) who use a rolling cast of characters, with a minor character in one novel emerging as the central character in the next. Gerry Fagan is still around for the second bo...
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