Tapani Lehtinen’s wife Johanna goes missing from their Helsinki home. But this isn’t the current safe and sophisticated Finnish capital of today – it’s a dysfunctional hell-hole, ravaged by the effects of climate change and social disintegration. This futuristic novel charts Tapani’s efforts to find his journalist wife, whose disappearance he believes is linked to her investigation into a savage serial killer, The Healer.
Moments in Tapani’s tense and anguished struggles are captured in high definition but low volume language. He tells us what it’s really like to be beaten with a baseball bat, to creep into a hiding place and wait for the killer, and to find a murdered child for the first time. Our reviewer called it, “philosophical, and ever so slightly detached, with an unnerving, ambiguous ending.”
