A few years ago I read Ice Moon, the first of Jan Costin Wagner's novels to be translated into English, and I was immediately curious about the next. Wagner is German, but his Detective Kimmo Joentaa is Finnish. His plots are set in Turku and Helsinki, amid forests and lakes and the abundant natural beauty of Finland's climate and geography. For a Californian like me, the landscape described through Joentaa's eyes is enough to set me dreaming of endless snowy nights or a midnight sun flickering on the dead calm of an isolated lake.

Silence is the second in the series. Joentaa is still grieving over the wife he was grieving over in the first book, but this melancholy aspect isn't as lachrymose as it sounds. The plot in the second book has to do with the long-ago abduction, rape and murder of a young girl, an unsolved case that haunts its original investigator even beyond his retirement. When it all seems to happen again (the same spot, method, etc.) the plot picks up again.

What sets Wagner's version of this standard trope apart is the delicacy with which he handles all the characters, including the killer and his inadvertent accomplice, the parents of the missing girls, and the handful of detectives drawn into the mystery. Sometimes critics characterize policiers being hard-boiled; I'd say this one is basted. Each narrative layer is seasoned and gently positioned, until the story achieves its final form, perfectly composed. Wagner's books aren't for readers who want pulse-pounding action, they're for the more contemplative sort who are willing to savor the sorrow, defeats and small human victories along the way to finding the killer – who by the end, is somehow beside the point. A finely spun tale of grief and unexpected compassion.