The Burning Stones (2023) by Antti Tuomainen
Good Reads meta-data is 251 pages, rated 3.56 by 231 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Finland
Verdict: A light touch.
Tagline: The forest primeval.
When a sauna is maxed with an occupant who cannot get out, this victim watches as the stove slowly gets hotter and hotter with no water on the coals, and…kaboom. Victim Number One is well done.
Turns out he was in contention for the CEO job at the very company that made that exploding stove. Two things follow: a crisis in selling those stoves and suspicion falls on the next in line for the CEO position: herself. Moreover, there is circumstantial evidence associating her with the crime scene conveniently left for the police, unaccustomed to investigating such a scene, to find. They find it and congratulate themselves on their genius.
The race is on between the police making a case against her, did I mention that the second in line is 50-year sales rep, a woman, no? Well she is. She competes with the police to find the real killer, since it is impossible, so Aristotle said, to prove conclusively something that did not happen, namely her guilt. Go ahead, try proving Aristotle didn’t say that!
Being a novice she hits a few snags, takes a few wrong turns, fishes for the usual red herrings, and implicates herself unwittingly in a second murder of a member of the board of the sauna stove manufacturer. Saunas are dangerous!
…
What I like is the setting of village Finland 50k from Helsinki in heavily wooded lake country in the last days of summer. The days are Finnish hot (18-20C) and the nights chilly. The slanting sun brings out the colour in the early fall foliage. All of that is nicely done. There is also a lot about how a sauna works. My only experience of a sauna was in grad school where one was available in the men’s locker room and I used it after weekly Wednesday night volleyball games a few times.
What I found confusing was the proper names for places (lakes, villages, resorts, people) with all those double vowels, diacritics, and polysyllabic built words. In the luxury of hindsight I also questioned the speed with which our Heroine jumped to conclusions. A 50-year old experienced sales rep would surely realise there are twists and turns in dealing with people, even though she was anxious to exonerate herself. There was also a distracting subplot involving her wayward husband whose whole life centred around F1 racing, she thought. While I found some of the detail of that fixation interesting it wore me out.