Finished
Helsinki White &
Helsinki Blood, 3rd & 4th in the late
James Thompson's Inspector Vaara, Intrepid Increasingly Morally-Compromised Finnish Murder-Investigator series, which brings us to the point where it suffered Author Existence Failure, with the forthcoming 5th novel partially completed and apparently now completed for publication, possibly with some assistance, and slated for release late this year.
So it's probably just as well that these installments form a complete 2-book character mini-arc for Vaara, his wife Kate, and his team as a kind of story of a downfall and crawl back up.
Once again, the actual investigative cases inside are self-contained, but the developments arising from them are not at all standalone, as each novel feeds into and refers back to others as a tightly interwoven ongoing personal and professional development storyline.
As part of the outcome of #2, Vaara gets increased autonomy and resources to run things his own way throughout the start of #3, which of course is something that comes back to bite him, as the persons responsible for his added authority have their own agendas, naturally, which Vaara finds himself in increasing disagreement with, but no easily apparent way from which to extricate himself from the situation.
I did wonder how Thompson was going to handle Kate's role in reacting to Vaara's increasing moral compromise, and find it rather refreshing they've kind of solved part of their earlier marital communication problems, even if it does kind of make her an accessory and they don't reach anything near full disclosure, which is probably for the best. And rather than being a well-adjusted deniable-criminality couple as the result of this sharing, or even having an initial agreeability ending in a falling-out, it actually does begin to affect their marriage in more subtly stressful ways.
And of course, there's Vaara's hand-picked team of close colleagues, who along with some characters from previous books, start to form a surrogate family with him, even as he's working on his legal family, neither of which turn out in quite the manner anyone would have been expecting. (Quite frankly, Vaara's squad simply aren't fit for the spirit of the law enforcement work that they're ostensibly doing, and it's just as well that they're kept in line in some manner and made to serve the cause of justice in an extra-legal sense, more or less. Better than letting them run loose on the streets, I suppose.)
It's probably just as well that in between their new clandestine stopping-street-level-crime-by-technically-committing-a-whole-lot-of-it duties, Vaara still has a murder or two to investigate, this time kicking off in #3 with what seems to be a politically motivated attack on an immigrant-supporting politician by racist hate crime groups, which ends up sparking a series of terroristic related killings, which may in turn be related to an unsolved kidnapping/murder of members of one of Finland's elite families.
This, as I've mentioned before, is a series that's somewhat on the gory sensationalistic side for its murders, which seem to be the trend in Nordic noir crime thrillers, and the shift in Vaara's actual duties pretty much ensures more regular violence as a matter of course, but #3 was actually more upsetting for the hate crime content and use of racial slurs, even if Vaara and his gang are confronting neo-Nazi groups and their supporters, some of whom are shown as fairly high up in the mainstream Finnish hierarchy, than any of the actual depictions of violence, IMHO. I suppose like littering, it's just too close to reality.
Thompson takes the time to write an Author's Note in the back of #3, regarding some of the real-life cases and conditions he based part of it on, as well as some commentary on the politically/racially-motivated Norwegian
2011 spree killings that happened shortly after he finished writing the book.
Anyway, as a direct result of #3, #4 starts out with Vaara, his team, and his family in a rather bad place, as they deal with some serious damage incurred (one of the relative positives of the series is that the narrative does not shy away from the physical and emotional consequences of their high-risk activities, even on persons who aren't directly involved), not to mention, some rather rabid chickens start coming home to roost. And Vaara tries to regain at least a part of his initial idealism in acquiescing to the very idea of his extra-legal crime-squad by trying to fulfill at least one of its initial objectives in stopping human trafficking.
As a result, this is actually the first Vaara case which doesn't involve investigating a murder, at least at first, and it's a refreshing change. (Although it does end up causing plenty of them, as usual.)
Unfortunately for him, though, he kind of has to do it while under siege from parties in previous books trying to get back at him for damages inflicted, and the whole of it goes to a rather thriller-esque and slightly surrealistic commando action plan which wouldn't be out of place in a Hollywood movie.
Thompson, apparently, was a long-time resident of Finland, but his US roots are very much showing in this book, which is kind of like watching a hybrid of
The Godfather trilogy and
The Shield TV series done on Finnish soil, but with slightly happier end-results.
In any case, it did make for a completed story/character development arc, and sets up the stage for the next set of adventures to start from a mostly-better place.
Medium-firm recommend overall if interested in the setting/themes for the series as a whole thus far, which can be treated as a completed mini-series, since the author is dead and Inspector Vaara's story can be regarded as essentially finished, even with the final posthumous volume coming up. It's an interesting stylistic trajectory which evolves from police procedural crime investigations to national political corruption conspiracy dirt-digging-up action thriller and goes from spending time solving-and-proving whodunnit to planning how-to-do-it-and-get-away-with-it, and then back again, in the space of four books.
Also, the development and fleshing out of the characters and their interactions over time is pretty good, IMHO, going to unexpected but overall logical places from their starting points as circumstances alter the people they might otherwise have ended up being. And there's a strong Finnish cultural flavour to all of this, which makes it more interesting to see all the more American-style tropes kind of grafted on to that base, in contrast to the generally lower-key Nordic crime books I've read from native-born authors (of all the previous ones I've read, Thompson seems closest to Jo Nesbø in
grand guignol style and love of twisty twistiness, even though Harry Hole never really got his own secret vigilante squad and kind of had do to that mostly all by himself).
I will warn again that #3 will probably be rather disturbing to Gentle Readers for the extreme racism and hate crime content which is its focus, but overall, I don't regret spending the money to buy #2 on sale, or walking out to the library this afternoon to pick up #3 & #4, and I'll be putting a hold on the forthcoming posthumous #5 when the library gets it, as I'm quite interested to see where Vaara and his people will go from the status quo (re-)established in the end.