From Fred Vargas to Kati Hiekkapelto

I have finally finished A Climate of Fear after many weeks. This is nothing to do with the quality of a fine book but more to do with my state of health and mind. I will be returning to hospital for investigation of a mysterious lump, something I would have ignored before I became acquainted with the C word. 

A Climate of Fear cleverly blended a little bit of frightening Icelandic folklore with French revolutionary terror brought to life in the modern day. Crime Fiction and the history of the French Revolution is a combination of two of my interests, so I enjoyed the book and once again Adamsberg showed his large team how to work out a very complex problem.

I have started to read The Exiled by Kati Hiekkapelto, translated by David Hackstrom. This the third in her Finnish detective Anna Fekete series after the two critically acclaimed books The Hummingbird and The Defenceless. 

In The Exiled Anna has returned to her family home in the ethnic Hungarian enclave in Serbia. I am only twenty five pages in but already gripped by the quality of the writing. Kati is an author who doesn’t shrink from telling the reader about the reality of life, and she deals with the gritty problems that affect all of Europe today. 

His observation was nothing but prejudiced supposition, thought Anna. Was there a single place on earth where ‘gypsy’ wasn’t a synonym for ‘thief’?