The same gravitas as those two cops from Halloween 5

56. My First Murder – Leena Lehtolainen

I haven’t been to Finland and have only had the opportunity to appreciate that which is Finnish from afar, like Finntroll (that’s Finny’s full name for good reason), Moomin, and the lovely film Heavy Trip in particular, plus of course I’ve seen the art of Tom. And I think Finland is probably a country that would staff Helsinki’s police force with enough detectives that they don’t need to assign a homicide case to a 23 year old law student who for some reason is a substitute officer as her summer job.

I guess Maria Kallio made it through their police academy, left because she was bored with low level cases and the amount of paperwork to be a law student (this does not seem like less paperwork), and then came back as a sub for the summer and is now a homicide detective, so she won’t be bored I guess. And the person who died is someone she knows and now she’s talking to her old friends to solve the case, which clearly involves no bias or blind spots. This is also the start of a many book series, but for me it’s a hard start because of the very concerning premise.

I know it’s fiction so anything can happen, but it has to ring true. It would be more plausible that this happened somewhere remote or super rural where there just isn’t anyone around and policing could somehow be a summer job, but that’s not Helsinki. I’m not surprised she had sexist colleagues that she had to prove wrong by solving the case; I am also not surprised that anyone would have issues with her being 23 and assigned a really significant role in the police force without even really being part of that force full time, regardless of gender. It was also not surprising to see her consistently getting herself into dangerous situations like someone who has no experience. Training matters and experience is earned over time. While it’s always good to have more female detectives to read about in Nordic and Scandi crime novels, I like it when it makes sense that they’re even working an important case a bit better.

Technically this wasn’t Thorfy’s first ineffective attempt at interacting with Snuffy, but it makes just as much sense as a random 23 year old solving a murder in a world capital.