My First Murder

I really enjoyed this probably for the reasons some people didn't. It's different. The tone is casual, things don't work perfectly (without it being a story arc of anti-hero corruption), and the 'hero' is ambivalent about her job. That's a refreshing change from the detective lifer. It's not a brilliant mystery, but it's entertaining candy.

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Maria Kallio has just been assigned her first murder investigation. To prove to herself and her squad that she has what it takes to be a detective, she’ll have to solve the death of Tommi Peltonen. Found floating facedown at the water’s edge of his Helsinki villa, Tommi had invited his choir group to spend a weekend at his retreat. But beneath the choir’s seemingly tight-knit bonds seethed bitter passion and jealousy. As Maria sets out to determine the difference between friends and foes, she uncovers the victim’s unsavory past—and motives for all seven suspects. Now it’s up to her to untangle a complex set of clues before the killer strikes again.

The first book in Leena Lehtolainen’s show more bestselling Finnish crime series starring Detective Maria Kallio, My First Murder offers hard-boiled realism from a female perspective.

My Review: I gave in and read a Scandicrime book. It's a serviceable police procedural told in first person by thirtyish Maria Kallio, law student and relentlessly single female interloper in the world of career police detectives. She appears as a replacement for a broken-down cop who injured himself in the line of duty, and she rapidly worked her way up the chain of command because 1) she's a girl and b) she's tough as nails.

Now, as to the mystery part, I liked it fine but didn't love it. Some interesting characters were adequately developed. What made my eyebrows rise was the reportedness of the atmosphere in which Maria works. She tells us a wee bit, basically a log-line, about the other crimes she and her department are pursuing; not enough to make us care, more than enough to make us curious, and just enough to bring the sense of urgency about the main case of this book to a halt. Can't put this down to first-book-itis, either, since this author had her first book published when she was twelve!

So what was I left with? A sea of Finnish names, all of which look wrong to me, and locations I know nothing whatsoever about, and a sense of being slightly seasick as Tommi and Tomppa and Tiina and Tiiu and Riku and Antti all blended into a mass of UUUUUIIIIUUYYPPPPAAAA. Finnish, when spoken, raises my hackles with its sheer alienness. When written, it causes me distress because it's got nowhere for me to grab hold of anything to give it meaning to me. Plus everything seems to wear umlauts, those freaky-deaky fangmarks that make all previously comprehensible sounds turn into strangled moans.

It's free to borrow on your Kindle, and that's what I'd recommend you do. At $2.99, it's not a break-the-bank download, but see if you can hang with the sheer Finnishness before committing actual funds to it.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

Finally, a series I have wanted to read for years has been translated from Finnish, and it was worth the wait. Maria Kallio is a bit like the classic reluctant PI, but she's a reluctant police officer, assuming it's just a job between being a punk rocker and something else. But she's a good detective, and has a wonderful voice and attitude. The story is a bit old-fashioned (a small group of suspects, a puzzle to solve) but it gets grittier as it goes along. I hope to read more of these. The translation is excellent.

Marie Kallio is a 23-year-old who is uncertain about her future. She worked with the police for a while and then decided she’d like to help both criminals as well as victims, so she started law school. Now she’s back temporarily at the Violent Crimes Unit of the Helsinki police. Her boss is an alcoholic who is absent more than present, so when a possible murder is reported, it is Kallio who is assigned the case.

Choir singer Tommi Peltonen is found dead one morning in the sea outside his parent’s summer house. The cause of death appears to be a blow to the head. Could he have fallen and hit his head? Accident or murder? The answer is resolved when an ax is found under the sauna in his yard containing his blood and bits of show more scalp.

Tommi and seven other choir members were there rehearsing for an upcoming show. Of course, it was not all work and no play. After rehearsal there was significant drinking and partying going on. As a result, none of the surviving singers is really sure of what happened late into the previous evening.

When Kallio arrives on the scene, she realizes that she knows many of the singers, having roomed with their friend in college. She does not recuse herself from the case but their friendship and the fact that they can’t really see Kallio in the police leadership role, makes conducting interviews difficult. She is also finding it hard to separate some friendships from her work.

As she talks and interviews the choir members, it appears, unsurprisingly, that most of them have had conflicts with Tommi, a renowned serial seducer who would flirt with single and married women, indiscriminately, including wives and girlfriends of his friends.

When Kallio sifts through some papers she found in Tommi’s apartment, she finds that he isn’t as innocent as everyone thought he was; he was involved in various nefarious goings on. That shifts the possible murderer to those outside the choir. Kallio has her hands full.

I was hesitant to review this book for you for several reasons. The first is that, written in 1993, it might be a little dated…although I didn’t really find it so. The second is that cozy mysteries don’t typically fall in the Nordic genre. But I realized that you can choose whether or not you want to read this. There is little action. Some of Kallio’s time is spent on other cases and her opinions about rapists, drinkers, etc. are described, which some may find interesting and others, not so much. Told in the first person, you learn how Kallio feels about a variety of issues: her parents, school, police work, her friends.

While My First Murder doesn’t necessarily meet the definition of a cozy mystery, a female amateur sleuth, it is a cozy in the writing style. One review said fans of Helen Tursten might like this (I recently reviewed Snowdrift for you) but Snowdrift was a solid police procedural while this is more rambling.

Overall, I did enjoy the book. show less

I like Scandinavian crime novels. The setting and the writing style enhance the genre, and the books that get translated into English are usually good. Of course, now so much is being published that I've also come across a few written and plotted just as sloppily as the worst mass market fiction produced here.

This is the first installment in a Finnish series by Leena Lehtolainen. In it, Maria Kallio is a reluctant homicide detective, having switched to policing partway through a law degree and contemplating returning to it. She's put in charge of what looks to be a fairly simple case when her immediate boss is off work and not due to return soon. Some members of a student choir group went off to spend a weekend together at a summer show more house and in the morning one of their number is found dead at the edge of the water. Somewhat differently than the usual Scandinavian crime novel, My First Murder is set up like a classic British detective story with a clear group of suspects gathered together in one place. While they do all return to Helsinki, the suspect pool is finite and Kallio is left to discover who the murderer is almost entirely on her own, which of course she does.

I'll confess right here that I find authors like [[Agatha Christie]] boring. I appreciate that they laid the building blocks for the modern crime novel, but I don't find the structure all that interesting. Lehtolainen does an adequate job and her protagonist is likable, if not always believable, but I doubt I'll read any more by her. Incidentally, this structure was used more successfully by another Scandinavian author,
Anne Holt, in 1222. show less

First Line: Riki woke up to a vicious call of nature.

It was supposed to be a fun weekend for the choir group at Tommi Peltonen's seaside Helsinki villa. Instead Tommi is found floating facedown in the water off the dock, a victim of what is soon determined to be murder. It is up to rookie detective Maria Kallio to focus on the choir members in an attempt to solve her very first murder case. It doesn't take long for her to realize that what on the surface appears to be a happy and close-knit group is really a collection of young people filled with bitterness, passion and jealousy. It will take a lot of digging for her to find the killer.

As much as I wanted to like this book, I simply could not. Too many things just did not add up. First, show more a rookie cop is put in charge of the murder investigation into the death of the son of a high-profile family. Yes, all her superiors are on some sort of leave or vacation, but why should that let the police put someone in charge who isn't even sure she wants to be a detective? One of Kallio's supervisors is a well-known drunk who often takes personal days to sleep off his latest bender. The other has taken vacation simply because he's sick and tired of doing all the drunk's work. This does not inspire much faith in East Helsinki's police force.

The pace of the book also drags quite a bit. There are several digressions while Kallio and the others are pulled away from the murder investigation to take care of other crimes. Although I know this happens in real life, these interruptions really impede the flow of the narrative-- to the point where I almost started shaking the book and telling the author to get a move on.

Maria Kallio talks a lot in the book. Too much of it is about her indecision over whether or not she should commit to a career in law enforcement. (Many times it sounds as though she thinks law enforcement is beneath her.) Once again I nearly began speaking to the book to tell Maria that, if she's so undecided, maybe she should resign and let someone else take over the investigation. I never really got any glimpses into her thought processes or how she was trying to solve the murder. By book's end it appeared that she just talked to all the choir members until she fell into the solution. Maria was a character who did not hold my interest-- and neither did any of the others.

All in all, I was very disappointed in this book. Even the Finnish setting was rather generic. Since it's the first book in a long-running series, I have to think that the books that follow show a great deal of improvement. However... I don't think I want to test this theory. show less

Mi primer muerto
Leena Lehtolainen
Publicado: 1993 | 208 páginas
Novela Intriga Policial
Serie: Maria Kallio #1

En Villa Maisetta, la intimidante finca de los Peltonen, encuentran muerto de madrugada al hijo de la familia, Jukka, un rico seductor con mentalidad de adolescente. En la villa se alojan esos días siete compañeros del joven en la coral de estudiantes, todos ellos con motivos sobrados para matar a Jukka: por celos profesionales o sexuales, por interés monetario… La detective encargada del caso, Maria Kallio, joven, pelirroja y muy poco convencional, recién reincorporada a la policía tras una temporada apartada del cuerpo para estudiar Derecho, tendrá que emplearse a fondo para enfrentarse a un caso con más de una show more conexión con su pasado. show less