Hella Mauzer is a fictional former policewoman in Helsinki, who now works as a private investigator. She is asked in 1953 by her old colleague to do a background check on a man who is under consideration to head the homicide bureau. She agrees upon the condition that she might also review the records from 1942 in which members of her own family were killed by a hit and run truck driver.
Initially, Mauzer believes that Johannes Heikkenen has an unblemished background but something about the house fire in which his wife died keeps her digging into his past. His relationship to an eccentric—perhaps even crazy – cousin becomes a key to her investigation.
Mauzer at first is stymied in her other investigation into her own family’s deaths. Her father had worked for Finland’s secret service and the official folder had been emptied of the investigators’ notes into the crash that took his life as well as those of Hella’s mother and sister. Perhaps a former colleague from the agency, with whom her father had planned to co-purchase a retreat by the lake, might provide some clues.
About the same time as World War II was erupting, Finland was losing territory in a war against the Soviet Union. When the Nazi Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Finland joined in the effort, hoping to win back some of its territory. A plot point in this novel is the Nazis’ demand that Finnish Jews be arrested, which Finland, as a matter of policy, refused to do. However, Soviet Jews captured by Finland during the war were turned over to the Gestapo—a fact which author Ivar ignores.
As Mauzer investigated Heikkenen and the circumstances surrounding her family’s death, the two probes became intertwined in her mind. Facts discovered in one helped her clarify the other in this fast-paced double mystery novel.
Republished fom San Diego Jewish World