20 Books of the Summer: Helsinki Blood by James Thompson

About three years ago I started exploring the entertaining world of Nordic Noir, translated crime fiction from the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Northern Finland. I needed something set in Finland for Reader of Rose CityThe European Reading Challenge I continued my exploration by borrowing a library copy of James Thompson’s 2013 Helsinki BloodAlthough I was a little hesitant to take a chance on an unknown author, after reading just a few pages I knew this piece of hard-boiled crime fiction was just what the doctor ordered.

Detective Kari Vaara is in a world of pain. A sting operation he recently led has left multiple people dead, a crippling gunshot wound to his knee, debilitating PTSD for his American expat wife Kate, and several corrupt high-ranking government officials angry that he bilked them out of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains while he was recovering from brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. Unable to take the chaos any longer, Kate leaves him and their baby daughter and flees to Florida, where she prefers the company of her drug-addicted brother. To make matters worse, hired thugs begin throwing rocks and later tear gas canisters through Vaara’s apartment windows to encourage him to hand over his millions in stolen money.

Beaten down in body and soul, Vaara enlists his loyal but equally morally compromised cop buddies to sort things out. He sends one to Florida with carte blanche to retrieve Kate before she’s permanently ruined by her junkie brother. Then he and his partner Sweetness (a gentle giant skilled in firearms and hand-to-hand combat who prefers to spend his free time drinking and having sex with his underage girlfriend) begin blackmailing their adversary’s hired muscle. Then, just when things can’t get any more interesting, he’s visited out of the blue by an Estonian woman begging him to find her missing daughter. Lured to Finland with promises of office work, she fears the young woman, who has Down syndrome, is being held captive by sex traffickers.

Helsinki Blood is unique among Nordic noir novels, at least compared to the ones I’ve read so far. First, it’s by an American. Until his untimely death in 2014, author James Thompson lived as an expat in Finland for nearly two decades, resulting in a fluent Finnish and an understanding of the country’s seedy underbelly. Second, Inspector Vara, the novel’s protagonist, is a damn good antihero. Beset by corrupt high-ranking officials in government and law enforcement on the one hand, and murderous criminal gangs on the other, Vara doesn’t just bend the law to his will, he crushes it. His willingness to take on the bad guys with no small amount of cleverness, firepower, and poetic justice would be right at home in the films of Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie, and brings an entertainingly bare-knuckle quality to the novel.

Sadly, Thompson was only able to write four novels for this series before he died. Fortunately, Helsinki Blood is definitely one of the pleasant surprises of this year. Don’t be surprised to see more of Inspector’s Vara’s adventures on my blog in the future.