Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Arrgghhh. How am I supposed to keep my buying down if you keep reminding me that there are new books I really want to read out?? I thought I had a bit before The King of Shanghai was out. Sigh. Well, maybe I'll get lucky and the BC Library download site will get it in before I give in to temptation.
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At least it'd be money well spent on a book you're sure to enjoy (I'll note that there's less of the particular sort of personally-oriented violence that IIRC both you and I disliked in #5-6)? And on supporting homegrown award-winning Canadian authors as well?
If you can hold out until the next coupon contest comes around, and Kobo keeps it at the current competitive-with-iTunes-and-Amazon new release discount price of $10-ish CAD, maybe you'll luck out on a good code and can get it for a lower cost if the BC Library doesn't oblige in time.
As for me, finished my first-freebie-read-which-led-to-a-discounted-sequel-purchase of the year: the late
James Thompson's
Snow Angels, 1st in his Inspector Vaara series of Nordic police procedural crime thrillers set in Finland, where Thompson was a long-time resident who apparently unexpectedly died last year. It also happens to have been an Edgar & Anthony Award-finalist for Best First Novel, which we (for UK account-holding values of "we") were offered f
ree late last year.
This was admittedly on the gory violent crimes side of Nordic mystery pieces, which I personally don't really care for but which tend to dominate the subsubgenre, but it was done fairly interestingly, in a very isolated small-town far North setting in Lapland, where a Finnish celebrity actress of Somalian descent has been murdered, and Vaara, whose previous experience has mainly consisted of being a Helsinki detective who thwarted robberies and such, must determine if her death is the racist hate crime it seems to be, a sadistic sex crime masquerading as a racist hate crime, or some sort of stalker/disgruntlement murder masquerading as a sadistic sex crime masquerading as a racist hate crime.
Complicating the investigation is that since it's a small town where everyone knows everyone, several of the suspects are persons with prior ties to Vaara, some of whom he could be reasonably accused of protecting or persecuting, based on the state of his relationships with them, and also that it happens during the holidays, when no one (including his support staff) wants to give up their vacation time.
The whodunnit for this turned out to be surprisingly multi-layered, with Vaara making understandable-in-retrospect false steps and mistaken assumptions during the course of his investigation (although some persons who were investigated did turn out to be guilty of some rather nasty stuff, even if not the particular crime they were being investigated for, so it's kind of like that scene in one Discworld novel where Sam Vimes is looking over a crowd of guests at a fancy reception, idly wondering what each one is guilty of, since the notion that any of them are truly innocent is laughable), and the parties who are ultimately guilty of the initial murder and its related crimes are a bit surprising, but do make sense in the end.
In between, there was some nice background of the bleakness of Arctic circle small village life in wintertime and the positives and negatives of the Finns' adapted mindset, as well as Vaara's US-born wife Kate's own difficulties adjusting to such isolation and the stresses, alongside that of the investigation, puts on their relationship.
Even though I'd have preferred less in the way of apparent psycho-sexual crazed killer-type violence (well, at least it wasn't a serial killer this time, since there are limits to how many I can reasonably assume occupy relatively low-crime Fenno-Scandinavia, even if Finland is supposed to have a per capita murder rate roughly equal to the US' and the highest in the region), I did end up rather enjoying this for the depiction of Finland and the character interactions (and the bits where they kind of end up mocking some of the investigative assumptions which have been influenced by US television and other Nordic noir crime thrillers).
Medium recommend if you're into police procedural crime thrillers set in isolated regions within a small circle of dysfunctional acquaintances, investigated by a professional sleuth who messes up in ways that an amateur couldn't accomplish (and can put up with a certain amount of violence which is sensationalistic even as it deplores the sensationalism). It's a promising start to an interesting-looking series which according to Wikipedia doesn't shy away from the eventual effects on the good Inspector, who seems slated to succumb to a "be careful when battling with monsters, lest you become one" sort of character evolution, which got abruptly derailed due to Author Existence Failure.
I ended up liking this one more than I thought I would, and now I'm curious about what happens next to put Vaara on the trajectory projected by Wikipedia (and what happens to Kate and his other friends along the way). And thus accordingly, I went and bought and started the 2nd-in-series,
Lucifer's Tears, which is currently fortuitously on sale for £1.49 from a number of UK outlets (well, not gonna lie, I noticed #2 was deep-discounted from its previous $12-ish CAD equivalent, and put #1 on the list to read to see if I wanted to get it while it was still cheap).