So, as it turns out, reading the
one AmazonCrossing maybe-glitch-freebie out of the half-dozen I actually paid for did work out, as all of Finnish author
Leena Lehtolainen's Maria Kallio, Intrepid Reluctant Cop Turned Aspiring Law Student mysteries went on sale for $1.99 each in the Amazon Big Deal Sale, good until tomorrow, IIRC, which was exactly the price point at which I'd decided I was willing to pick up the rest of the series (though I wouldn't have argued against lower).
Accordingly, read my new acquisitions of
Her Enemy and
Copper Heart, respectively 2nd & 3rd in the series.
It's interesting to see Maria Kallio move in and out of the cop role, as the 2nd book sees her having quit the force and become an ordinary law student and investigating the murder as such, and the 3rd book sees her having taking up an assistant sheriff role in her home town as a summer job for money.
So you get a sense of what it's like to try to follow up leads as a private citizen who isn't quite amateur, and then as a small-town part-time official more used to the resources of larger cities, and I liked the way that Maria had to vary her approach in each book. (And she also tends to refer to other cultural touchstone detectives with "What Would Lord Peter Wimsey Do?" or "This Would Never Happen To Philip Marlowe" types of musing comparing her own sleuthing skills to the well-known greats.)
Once again, both murders are strongly tied to Maria's own direct close personal acquaintance circle, involving people she's met and known fairly well for some time, who have their own further ties to other persons close to Maria, and so are almost all of the suspects. There's actually a point where she picks up on this, and I've always liked it when the sleuths finally realize that they've just kind of become murder magnets.
It's like the "crossing of the return threshold" section of
The Hero's Journey. Only with corpses!
(But apparently in the 4th book which is not out yet in English, Maria finally gets to investigate the death of an actual stranger. Maybe.)
Again, these are very "procedural realism" sorts of books with an emphasis on doing the legwork and uncovering the clues thusly (with a bit of aid from a few leaps of intuition) and heavily tilted towards showing you how Finnish culture (circa the mid-90s) works when murder is involved. Although there is a kind of tendency to go after the most-likely suspect in a rather impulsive and melodramatic fashion, but admittedly she did have backup for one of the times she tried it even if it did go wrong for other reasons.
Medium recommend if you think you'd like a low-key mildly retro realistic procedural book in an interestingly different (if you're not Finnish) cultural setting. I enjoyed these enough that I'll be picking up the 4th and future translated installments when they're discounted to the good sale prices.
Also read two more AmazonCrossing murder mysteries by Icelandic author
Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson, who's one of the authors I picked up during that long-ago sale, but not for the particular books that I read.
Daybreak, a current Amazon monthly "Books for $2" sale title, which is how I got it a couple of days ago, and
Sun on Fire, which was an Amazon Deal of the Day last month, are the 1st & 2nd books in his unofficially untitled maybe-series (only 2 so far, but I'd be happy to read more) with Reykjavik Police detectives Birkir Li Hinriksson, a Vietnamese-born naturalized Icelander of possibly Chinese descent, and his working partner Gunnar Marķusson, an ethnic Icelander whose mother is a German immigrant.
Both of these dealt with rather unusual crimes, the 1st with a possible serial killer apparently targeting goose hunters, who seems to be taking his/her cues from
The Most Dangerous Game, and the 2nd involving the essentially locked-room murder of a party guest at the Icelandic embassy in Berlin. And they also had portions of an apparent secondary crime which may or may not have truly intersected with the actual primary crime, just to make things more interesting.
Both of these had whodunnits which worked out to be rather convoluted but, at least in the 2nd, made perfect sense in the end (the 1st was a little too serial killer thriller in its motivations for my taste, although the case did hang together), with somewhat complex and carefully unfolded investigations which were a bit of a challenge to the detectives (and the Gentle Reader).
The 1st one also had more than a bit of meta with the supporting character of an author commenting on what qualities a detective needed to have to make for a good detective story (and made fun of itself a bit by claiming that the actual detectives in the story were far too boring and ordinary), as well as a cat-and-mouse game involving clues which referred to various popular mystery/crime sleuths.
While these are still rather realistically procedural, they're somewhat less focused on that aspect than the Maria Kallio books, and give more in the way of personal insights into Birkir and Gunnar and their colleagues on the Reykjavik police force than Icelandic cultural workings, though there's still a good deal of that. And it's interesting to see Birkir's interactions within the only culture he's ever truly known, having been raised in Iceland since he was a very small child and having few real memories of his refugee roots or even ability to speak his long-forgotten first language, where he's often treated as an outsider due to his visibly-ethnic physical appearance (apparently, being mistaken for Greenlandic Inuit is the least of it), and the contrast of Gunnar's acceptance, despite having stronger foreign ties as a half-German and often visibly communicating in German with his elderly mother and others.
Medium-firm recommend if you're interested in reading Icelandic not-quite-noir-but-getting-there. The 2nd book, IMHO, has a much better case than the 1st, better grounded in more understandable regular human motivations. But the 1st is pretty dramatic (and was popular enough to be made into an Icelandic TV miniseries) and it's a reasonably good read as well, especially if you can get it on sale.
Now onto more of
Ian Hamilton's Ava Lee, Intrepid Globe-Trotting Stolen Money Recovering Forensic Accountant series, which I picked up the first 4 volumes of during Kobo's recent weekend sale and am liking enough to read through and scoop the 2 further volumes I'm missing from the library this week, I think.