Title: The Hummingbird
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟1/2
"Anna saw nothing wrong with looking for a better quality of
living. Surely it was natural for everyone to search for such a thing? Why
should it be restricted to people who already had everything they needed?"
Book Description:
Anna Fekete, who fled the Yugoslavian wars as a child, has
just started working as a criminal investigator in a northern Finnish coastal
town, when she is thrust into a rolling murder investigation. It doesn t help
that her middle-aged new partner, Esko, doesn t bother hiding his racist
prejudices. Anna s work as a criminal investigator barely gets off the ground
before she is thrust into a high-profile, seemingly unsolvable case that has
riveted the nation. A young woman has been killed on a running trail, and a
pendant depicting an Aztec god has been found in her possession. Another murder
soon follows. All signs point to a serial killer, but can Anna catch the
Hummingbird before he or she strikes again?
My musings:
I am a huge fan of Scandinavian crime novels, but found I had
never before read one set in Finland – this needed to be remedied ASAP! Kati
Hiekkapelto is a new author for me, and I am happy to say that I really enjoyed
her writing style. In particular, main protagonist Anna Fekete is a well-drawn
and intriguing character who really drove the story. Born into a Hungarian
minority group in Yugoslavia, Anna had to flee the war-torn country with her
parents as a child and has spent most of her childhood in Finland, yet still
remains an outsider, identifying herself more with her Hungarian background
than her Finnish one. She recently left her old workplace to commence a new
position as criminal investigator in the same northern Finnish coastal town she
grew up in, where her estranged brother is still living. Starting her new job
knowing that she was hired to represent an ethnic minority in the workforce,
Anna knows that she will be likely to battle prejudice and pressure from some
colleagues, who are resenting the ever-growing number of migrants coming to the
country. However, she has not bargained with being partnered with the worst
offender, Esko, who is not afraid to tell her how he feels about “bloody
foreigners” in general.
Anna’s migrant background and her feelings of constantly
being torn between her heritage and her new adopted country rang true for me,
and added a depth to the story missing in many other crime novels. Without
Anna, the murders themselves, whilst interesting, would otherwise have blended
into the fray of many other similar stories. As an added bonus, Hiekkapelto
also introduces an interesting side story to the main murder-mystery, that of a
teenage Kurdish girl who has made a phone call to emergency services to call
for help but now claims that this has been a misunderstanding. Anna knows that
many of these girls disappear without a trace, forcibly married off to
strangers by their own families, and suspects that the girl is too afraid to
talk to her for fear of retribution from her parents.
I loved the way Hiekkapelto introduces topical themes of
immigration, racism and cultural differences into her story, with Anna
representing one of the migrant groups who have assimilated well into their new
country but still struggle with adversity, whether through feeling torn between
their two home countries or struggling against people’s prejudices. The author’s
spare and direct prose perfectly creates the bleak and chilly atmosphere so
typical of Nordic noir, which is one of the reasons I seek out the genre above
others. The only criticism I would make is that the translation could have done
with a bit of tweaking to read more smoothly, which is an art that is often
difficult to achieve.
Summary:
All in all, The Hummingbird was an enjoyable police
procedural with an interesting main protagonist and I will definitely come back
to read more in the series.
