Crime Novel

A delightfully alternative twist on Nordic noir

A mysterious criminal is gliding through the winter dark of Helsinki and subjecting his victims to a series of unbearable embarrassments. Hermann Ångström leaves a young bride at the altar, disguises himself as a doctor and delivers false medical reports, sends a government official into a downward spiral of depression – it’s a veritable plague of shame. Ångström’s next target is impossible to predict, and his methods are growing ever more devious. Who is this man – also known as the Hämeenlinna humiliator – and what is his motive?

The case is assigned to Commissioner Vehmas, a widower who believes that the future is an illness and that police work is folk poetry. And though he’s seen it all, even Vehmas can’t seem to track down Ångström. Until serendipity steps in.

At once suspenseful and blackly comic, Crime Novel is a playful twist on Nordic crime fiction from one of Finland’s greats.

Petri Tamminen, born in 1966, worked as an editor at several Finnish newspapers. His highly acclaimed books include Elämiä (Lives), Piiloutujan maa (The Land of the Hiding), and Enon opetukset (What My Uncle Taught Me). He has been translated into numerous languages, including Czech, Danish, German, Slovene and Swedish.

‘Anything but your standard game of cat and mouse…’ Typographical Era

‘Nowhere are drunken stupor and truthfulness as important as in the Finnish art of storytelling, and no one has so intricately linked melancholy and farce as Petri Tamminen’ Literaturen

‘Tamminen can write sentences that immediately hit a nerve and throw the unprepared reader laughing from their chair. But the very next sentence can mesmerize with its beauty’ Forssan Lehti