Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
Finland, 1953, eight years after the war, when memories and scars of Nazi and Soviet occupation are still sore. To her surprise, ex-cop turned Private Investigator Hella Mauzer is called in by her old boss, with whom she was never the best of friends, to help him out with a touchy little matter of running some undercover checks on a secret service high-up running for promotion to exalted heights.
A routine job, according to her old boss, which is enough to tell her that it won’t be, at a time when she is anyway obsessed in clarifying what happened a decade before to her parents who died in what was almost certainly a contract killing.
No reader will be surprised when the two cases appear to be linked. But Ivar has created an interesting heroine, back for her third incarnation and again poking into hornets’ nests wherever she finds them. She also has an ex-boyfriend who thinks they should get together again. And an attractive young man nearby who has taken a more than casual interest in her. Even the man from the secret service behaves nicely to her. It’s all too good to be true.
So, what is the truth? Will she find out? You bet she will.
