Violence and gentleness are entwined in this haunting psychological thriller
When a young woman dies peacefully in her sleep, her husband sits distraught at her side. Returning to his job at the Finland CID he finds that a murder inquiry is just beginning. A woman has been smothered with her pillow while she slept and, as the case unfolds, others will be found having met death in the same eerily quiet and bloodless way. It is a very tranquil, peaceful sort of death, in which the victims appear to have experienced neither fear nor pain.
The young policeman, stricken with his own feelings of grief and loneliness, starts to feel an affinity with this humane killer. Meanwhile the murderer's dysfunctional relationship with his own cracked personality spawns increasingly macabre behaviour.
The juxtaposition of the plights of these two young men results in a story haunting and unsettling, a novel peopled with characters who share the anxiety of feeling misunderstood, even by themselves.
Wagner's sharp, snappy style is flawless, and the tragedy of this crime story resonantly poignant.