Great Crime Fiction for a Cold Autumn Night!

Nothing but the Truth by Jarkko Sipila (2006. Ice Cold Crime. ISBN 978-0982444931)

A low-level drug dealer is shot, execution style at the threshold of his seedy Helsinki dive. A neighbor, a single mother with a pre-teen daughter and an abusive ex-husband, sees the getaway car and driver. She hesitates to call the Helsinki police. “Why get involved?” her boss says, urging her to remain silent. In the end, Mari Lehtonen does the right thing: She steps forward and becomes the State’s key witness in a murder investigation. But can the police protect Mari from retaliation? This is the story behind Nothing but the Truth, the latest in the “Helsinki Homicide” series from Ice Cold Crime of Independence, Minnesota.

It’s interesting reviewing an author’s work in reverse chronological order. Previously, I read and reviewed Jarkko Sipila’s more recent titles, Against the Wall (2009) and Vengeance (2010). So here I am, reviewing an earlier novel by Mr. Sipila, Nothing but the Truth (2006. Gummerus (in Finnish). 2011. Ice Cold Crime (in English). ISBN 978-0-9824449-3-1). And while Sipila’s later works have been well written and concise, the sort of tight writing one wants in a beach read (which most crime novels tend to be), they lacked the revelation of character that, for me, sets a good book apart from its competition. After reading Nothing but the Truth this past weekend, I now know that Jarkko Sipila cares about the people who populate the Helsinki of his imagination. And in this reviewer’s humble opinion, that’s a huge plus.

The cast of characters in this earlier installment of the “Helsinki Homicide” series includes some of the same folks found in Sipila’s later work, including Kari Takamäki, (a Detective Lieutenant in the Helsinki Violent Crimes Unit) and Suhonen (an aging, hockey playing undercover detective in the same unit). Sipila clearly has a fondness for Suhonen’s lone-wolf personality: The author gives the shadowy detective center stage. But the writing (unlike the two other Sipila books I’ve read) doesn’t suffer from too much action and not enough humanity: Here, Jarkko Sipila gives us a full-blooded Suhonen, a character with a complete history and personality. Consider this fine bit of writing:

Salmela took the first rod and dropped the lure into the water. It fluttered along easily next to the boat. He let out the line about fifty feet, made a small loop, and clamped it with a spring-loaded clip that had a ring for the planer leader. Salmela let out the line till the ring reached almost to the planer, then he propped the rod up in the holder.

 Within five minutes, all four lines were in the water. “Once you get a hit, the fish will jerk the clip off the line and you just reel him in. That’s it. You take the first hit. I’ll take the next. Just remember to brace yourself when you take the rod out of the holder.”

 Suhonen began to suspect that this wasn’t a friend’s boat after all. Salmela seemed to know his way around it well enough. Or maybe he had more than borrowed it…

 So the burly undercover detective enjoys an occasional day off and, though not an avid salmon fisherman, will take up a rod and reel when invited? The cited passage humanizes Suhonen, puts flesh on the bones of his character, making us care about what it is he does for a living and how he does it. This is the sort of development of a protagonist that seemed to be lacking in the Jaarko Sipila books I read and reviewed earlier. The author clearly knows how to write: It’s simply a matter of applying his skills.

Similar nuance and care is shown in how Sipila reveals Mari Lehtanen’s past, her fears, her personality. It would an easy thing to portray her ex-husband, who clearly abused Mari during their marriage, as a stereotypical, beer-swilling bastard. But Sipila takes the time to show us more, to weave the complexities of humanity into these two characters making them believable and authentic.

Another nice touch (for this American lawyer-turned-judge) was the use of the Finnish court system as a setting for a portion of the narrative. Sipila (a crime reporter in Finland) had me scrambling to verify that Finland does indeed have: a jury system (generally one law judge and three lay judges (also called jurors) for most serious criminal cases); life sentences for murder convictions; and the same burden of proof as the U.S. criminal justice system. (Sipila got that last one wrong. On p. 94 of the book, the burden of proof for conviction in Finland is depicted as “clear and convincing evidence”, a lesser standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt”, the burden applicable in Finnish criminal courts. See Heuni: The European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control in Finland (2001) @ http://www.heuni.fi/uploads/mwlahyuvuylrx.pdf, and “A Comparison of Criminal Jury Decision Rules in Democratic Countries” by Ethan Lieb (Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 5:629, 2008)).

Despite this minor inaccuracy, the court scenes added much to the overall complexity and interest of the story: I’d love to see more from Jaarko Sipila in this vein. Learning something new, even from a “beach read” is never a bad thing!

For those readers who like full-throated, pedal-to-the-metal crime novels, Nothing but the Truth is a fast and furious read filled with memorable characters and plenty of action. Highly recommended.

4 and ½ stars out of 5.

(This review first appeared in the most recent edition of New World Finn. If you’re a drop of Finnish blood, or simply interested in Finnish art and culture, buy the newspaper. You can find it at: http://newworldfinn.com/.)