Nykanen is a Finnish writer of noir. I stumbled on his name in a review of other Finnish authors and thought I would give him a try. Despite its 280 pages, it felt like a novella.
Raid is an assassin who stumbles on a kid being chased by some South American drug runners. The kid had found several kilos of cocaine being smuggling in shipments of bananas. Son of the grocer where the bananas had been mistakenly shipped, the kid (who is much older than I would consider as a kid) decided to sell what he could, naively unworried about those who actually thought they owned the coke. Raid gets the kid out of his immediate predicament, but he knows they’ll be back so he decides to have the police get involved to take the heat of the kid and his family. Enter police Lt. Jansson who unwittingly has been investigating two murders seemingly unrelated to the coke.
The irony of this book is that it’s about 75% police procedural and really very little of the title character. Not a problem, just an observation. I would hope the author might have plans to develop a series around the police characters who, in the main, are far more interesting than Raid. Fast, uncomplicated read. Sometimes complications can be a good thing.
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