Days of the Last Snow (novel)

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Days of the Last Snow is a detective novel by the German writer Jan Costin Wagner from 2014. It is the fifth novel in the series about the Finnish Commissioner Kimmo Joentaa. A girl dies in an accident with hit and run , a Hungarian prostitute and her pimp are murdered, and a young man prepares for a killing spree before. The investigation reveals that the events have more to do with each other than it seems at first glance.

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Lasse Ekholm had an accident on the drive home from his daughter Anna's ice hockey training session. An oncoming car pushes him into the ditch, where he hits a tree. Eleven-year-old Anna dies in the collision. Ekholm is the head of the architecture office where Kimmo Joentaa's wife Sanna, who died a few years ago, worked. After a long period of mourning, the detective of the criminal police in Turku, Finland, is now living with a prostitute, of whom he only knows her working name Larissa and who keeps leaving him for weeks and months, only to return suddenly and without explanation. She left him again a few days ago and so Joentaa, more privately than on business, stands by Ekholm in his grief.

The corpses of a foreign couple draped on a park bench are found in Helsinki . Marko Westerberg, head of the violent crime department there, and his young colleague Seppo take over the investigation. It quickly turns out that the dead are a Hungarian prostitute and her Romanian companion. The woman worked in a brothel in Salo , which is why Joentaa and his colleagues Sundström and Grönholm take over the investigations on site.

Flashbacks report how Markus Sedin, fund manager at Norda-Bank, met the prostitute Réka Nagy during merger talks in Ostend, Belgium . The 42-year-old family man, who suffers from alienation from his sick wife Taina and their son Ville, falls in love with the 19-year-old carefree young woman. He visits her in her Hungarian home village, where the family, dependent on the daughter's income, lives in poor circumstances, and finances the mother's expensive operation. After all, he rents an apartment for Réka in Helsinki so that he can meet her at any time. Sedin's secret idyll only bursts when a colleague from Norda-Bank calls. He learns that his lover lied to him and that he works in a brothel in Salo without his knowledge. He drove to Helsinki that night as if stunned, had a near collision with an oncoming car and caused the death of little Anna. The next morning he removes two dead people from his apartment: Réka and Victor Dinu, their pimp, shot dead with the Romanian's pistol.

For a long time nobody seems to care about the two dead, whose identity cannot be determined, and they are buried anonymously in Finland. Only when Réka's brothers find the missing person report on the Internet does the mother set off to far-off Finland to look for her daughter. Your clues lead the police on the trail of Markus Sedin, who allows himself to be arrested without resistance and willingly nods to all questions. Only Joentaa notices that Sedin does not answer one question, that of whether he shot the dead. The movements on Réka's account lead to a second "love affair", a suitor who let himself be ripped off by the prostitute because he fell in love with her. It's about Jarkko Falk, Sedin's young colleague from the Asia department, who also met Réka in Ostend and supported her with some money transfers. He couldn't bear to see her again in Finland at Sedin's side and shot her and her pimp. Then he traveled to Ostend to kill himself.

Joentaa is still waiting for Larissa to return, who confessed to him by e-mail that she herself had lived for some time on the financial donations of so-called "love casualties". It seems more important than ever to him to find out her real name. He finds out when one morning two policemen ring the bell at his door and ask for a Mari Beck. She died that night in a car accident caused by Lasse Ekholm. When numerous weapons are found in the trunk of the car, it turns out that Ekholm's suicidal act prevented a rampage on the Moomins' island , which Mari's brother Unto, influenced by the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik , planned and from whom he planned his Sister wanted to dissuade to the last. Mari Beck alias Larissa gave birth to a daughter shortly before, when her father registered her as Kimmo Joentaa. She named the girl Sanna in order to give her friend Kimmo a Sanna back before she wanted to disappear from his life for good.

background

For Jan Costin Wagner, Finland is “a universal place” where he wants to tell a “fundamentally human story”. He always confronts the characters in his books with the “worst possible” in order to “find a language for possible coping”. The novel is therefore “warm-hearted and sad” at the same time, which is what its protagonist Kimmo Joentaa, who has learned to live with grief, stands for. From his own loss he draws the strength to understand people and to be there for them, to be patient and to allow himself to be grieved by others. With the character Unto Beck, on the other hand, Wagner wanted to show a person who is becoming more and more alienated from the world and who translates his hard-to-understand feelings into language. As further themes in the novel, Wagner named the “psychological and moral 'collisions'” that are played out in the novel, the “simultaneity of sadness and happiness” and the question of how very different events depend on each other.

reception

Days of the Last Snow achieved 20th place on the Spiegel bestseller list in the hardcover / fiction category and 2nd place on the KrimiZEIT best list in March 2014 . The reviews in the German-language feature sections were consistently positive.

For Ralph Gerstenberg Wagner succeeded in “a great, a sovereign, a moving novel - a preliminary highlight of his Kimmo-Joentaa series”, which also functions as a detective novel. Tobias Becker does not find a classic Whodunnit in the novel , but a psychological study in which the author creates "cinematic precise, visually powerful scenes" and "powerful dialogues" and formulates laconic sentences that one would like to read out loud. In the end, however, too many coincidences and strokes of fate would endeavor "that the tragedy threatens to become silly". Andreas Platthaus sees the novel as a well-observed and narrated “study of loneliness” that requires more attention than an ordinary detective novel. Only the Finnish setting is neglected. For Christoph Schröder, the crime genre is only a “vehicle for this fine and extremely precise narrator”. However, the “volte”, with which the author links all the storylines together, “still amazes even experienced detective novel readers”.

According to Uwe Wittstock, Jan Costin Wagner writes “no thrillers, no action orgies, but precisely balanced psychological studies, as poetic and melancholy as a snowy winter landscape.” Elmar Krekeler calls the days of the last snow a “novel like a perfect snowflake” in which the heaviest issues become easy and the main character is “more a grieving comforter than a detective”. According to Rainer Moritz , the book “effortlessly meets the high standards set by its psychologically and narrative convincing predecessors”. The author "skilfully exposes the psychological peculiarities of his protagonists and the downsides of a modern, decadent society through a cleverly conceived, exciting scenario".

filming

The novel was in 2019 with Henry Hübchen , Bjarne girl , Barnaby Metschurat , Victoria Mayer , Mercedes Mueller , Victoria Trauttmansdorff and Jannik Schümann filmed . Directed by Lars-Gunnar Lotz . The script by Nils-Morten Osburg moved the plot from Finland to Germany, specifically to Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg . Instead of Kimmo Joentaa, the investigating commissioner is now called Johannes Fischer and is significantly older than his counterpart from the novel. Nevertheless, Jan Costin Wagner certified that the script had captured the “spirit of the book”. The production was awarded the Audience Award of the German Television Crime Prize 2020.

expenditure

Reviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ralph Gerstenberg: Encounters with the worst possible . In: Deutschlandfunk from September 19, 2014.
  2. ↑ The simultaneity of happiness and sadness . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 11, 2014.
  3. ↑ Days of the last snow ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buchreport.de archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at book report .
  4. ↑ The ten best crime novels in March 2014 . In: Die Zeit of March 6, 2014.
  5. ↑ Review notes on days of the last snow (novel) at perlentaucher.de .
  6. ↑ Tobias Becker: Krimi by Jan Costin Wagner: The silent one determines again . In: Spiegel Online from January 8, 2014.
  7. ↑ Andreas Platthaus: In another time, in another place . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 10, 2014.
  8. ↑ Christoph Schröder: Language of Silence . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of January 23, 2014.
  9. ↑ Uwe Wittstock: The one who comes from the cold . In: Focus from January 4, 2014.
  10. ↑ Elmar Krekeler: The most brutal snowflake in crime history . In: Die Welt from January 10, 2014.
  11. ^ Rainer Moritz: Liebeskasper, massacre and accidental death . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from January 14, 2014.
  12. ↑ Days of the last snow on Network Movie .
  13. ↑ Kurt Sagatz: Death, and how we live with it . In: Der Tagesspiegel from February 2, 2020.
  14. ↑ The 2020 award winners at the German TV Crime Festival.