Finished a re-read of
Snow Woman,
My First Murder, and
Her Enemy, by
Leena Lehtolainen, respectively #4, #1, & #2 in her Maria Kallio series of 1990s era Finnish police procedurals. I started the re-read of #4 because of morbid curiosity after reading #5 & #6 earlier, which kept referencing particular plot-important things that happened in #4 which I had no recollection of whatsoever even while re-reading, although the other parts of the story were familiar. (And then I went to revisit #1 out of curiosity, which I'd since acquired in French translation during a sale and wanted to compare (for no particular reason I can discern, the English translator changed the name of the murder victim, which didn't seem that unusual/confusing for an English-language audience). But the tandem side-by-side reading idea stalled as I started getting back into the story again and couldn't maintain the same speed in both languages.)
It seems that unless a case has something fairly distinctive and memorable* about it—either rather clever means or unusual motivation or really good execution of the twists or just plain ridiculous implausibility—I tend to completely forget the whodunnit until I'm practically on top of the confrontation scene again. I've had this happen before upon certain mystery series re-reads, but I thought it was a peculiar anomaly associated with just a couple of books, since I could remember the others just fine. But it turns out it's not them, it's me. Which I guess is a kind of value-add if I can get the full attempted case-solving experience out of them again?
Anyway, these were enjoyable as when I first read them, and interesting to see the bits of Maria's past life scattered throughout that would be referenced again in later books. That gave a nice sense of retrospective continuity to it all, and I liked going back over her character development as she eventually moves from not wanting to be a career cop and trying out various other options first before she would eventually settle down in later books. (And this time around I noticed there was a rather clever case-related translation pun in the title of #2.
)
* Sometimes that doesn't work. I thought for sure I remembered who the culprit in #2 was because I remembered a distinctive aspect about them which they were introduced with. Turns out they were actually the victim in the next chapter, oops, and not in a “disposable catspaw of the greater mastermind” way.
But I did remember the actual culprit after that, though not the motivation which the sleuth still beat me to figuring out again.