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    My First Murder
    My First Murder
    My First Murder
    Audiobook7 hours

    My First Murder

    Written by Leena Lehtolainen

    Narrated by Amy Rubinate

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Twenty-three-year-old law student Maria Kallio is recruited for a temporary position at the Helsinki police department. Sweet-faced but tough and hot-tempered, Maria faces pushback from her new squad—so when a young playboy is murdered at his family’s summer villa, the new detective is out to prove herself.

    Found floating facedown at the water’s edge after a night of partying, Tommi Pelatonen appears to have been murdered by one of his closest friends—but why? As Maria discovers, bitter passion and jealousy seethe under the placid surface of the group’s privileged, carefree lifestyle. As Maria uncovers the victim’s unsavory secrets, motives for all seven suspects come to light. Now it’s up to her to untangle the clues before the killer strikes again.

    The first book in Leena Lehtolainen’s international bestselling Nordic crime series starring Detective Maria Kallio, My First Murder serves up murder with a slice of life in the Finnish upper crust.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    TranslatorOwen F. Witesman
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781469211817
    My First Murder
    Author

    Leena Lehtolainen

    Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. A keen reader, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she began her first book—a young adult novel—and published it two years later. She released her second book at the age of seventeen. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the 1997 Vuoden Johtolanka (Clue) Award for the best Finnish crime novel and the Great Finnish Book Club prize in 2000. Her work has been published in twenty-nine languages. Besides writing, Leena enjoys classical singing, her beloved cats, and—her greatest passion—figure skating. Her nonfiction book about the sport, Taitoluistelun lumo (The Enchantment of Figure Skating), was chosen as the Sport Book of the Year 2011 in Finland. Leena lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.

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    Reviews for My First Murder

    3/5

    89 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Ok story and good introduction to Maria Kallio - I'm so glad she kept writing more and more though, because I find the later books much better, more exciting, and beautifully written.

      Unfortunately, the the voice actor for this series has a breathy (yet persnickety somehow) speaking style and whispers the ending to every phrase, which is grating, especially as we get to know the main character and it just doesn't match her personality at all.
    • 2/5
      I’m not sure if it was so much the writing or the translation, but the style of writing didn’t sit right in some places. It sounded as if an old man was talking instead of a young woman using terms like “pussyfooting” and “not a red cent”
    • 3/5
      Marie Kallio is a 23-year-old who is uncertain about her future. She worked with the police for a while and then decided she’d like to help both criminals as well as victims, so she started law school. Now she’s back temporarily at the Violent Crimes Unit of the Helsinki police. Her boss is an alcoholic who is absent more than present, so when a possible murder is reported, it is Kallio who is assigned the case.Choir singer Tommi Peltonen is found dead one morning in the sea outside his parent’s summer house. The cause of death appears to be a blow to the head. Could he have fallen and hit his head? Accident or murder? The answer is resolved when an ax is found under the sauna in his yard containing his blood and bits of scalp.Tommi and seven other choir members were there rehearsing for an upcoming show. Of course, it was not all work and no play. After rehearsal there was significant drinking and partying going on. As a result, none of the surviving singers is really sure of what happened late into the previous evening.When Kallio arrives on the scene, she realizes that she knows many of the singers, having roomed with their friend in college. She does not recuse herself from the case but their friendship and the fact that they can’t really see Kallio in the police leadership role, makes conducting interviews difficult. She is also finding it hard to separate some friendships from her work.As she talks and interviews the choir members, it appears, unsurprisingly, that most of them have had conflicts with Tommi, a renowned serial seducer who would flirt with single and married women, indiscriminately, including wives and girlfriends of his friends.When Kallio sifts through some papers she found in Tommi’s apartment, she finds that he isn’t as innocent as everyone thought he was; he was involved in various nefarious goings on. That shifts the possible murderer to those outside the choir. Kallio has her hands full.I was hesitant to review this book for you for several reasons. The first is that, written in 1993, it might be a little dated…although I didn’t really find it so. The second is that cozy mysteries don’t typically fall in the Nordic genre. But I realized that you can choose whether or not you want to read this. There is little action. Some of Kallio’s time is spent on other cases and her opinions about rapists, drinkers, etc. are described, which some may find interesting and others, not so much. Told in the first person, you learn how Kallio feels about a variety of issues: her parents, school, police work, her friends.While My First Murder doesn’t necessarily meet the definition of a cozy mystery, a female amateur sleuth, it is a cozy in the writing style. One review said fans of Helen Tursten might like this (I recently reviewed Snowdrift for you) but Snowdrift was a solid police procedural while this is more rambling.Overall, I did enjoy the book.
    • 3/5
      This book is okay. Predictably, it's a police procedural novel with the lead detective trying to solve a murder. The main character is a young police woman in her early twenties and it's her disposition that will keep you interested (or not) as the book is written in the first person. I originally gave it four stars but have downgraded it to three as it became more confusing the further on I read. I think this might have been down to losing track of who was who when it came to the suspects. They were all a bit similar. However, I live in Helsinki and loved reading the descriptions of the places I know. I also enjoyed the translation and this comes from someone who's read a lot of badly translated Finnish literature. A must if you like feisty female cops and nordic adventures!
    • 4/5
      This Finnish detective story has loads of local colour and a likable heroine. I'll definitely check out the rest of the series.
    • 3/5
      My very first thought for this review is that if you are the kind of person who is able to easily participate in gossip and life-chatter, you will enjoy this book. Otherwise, it's not anything you should think of picking up. There was a lot of reflection on the main character's past that had nothing at all to do with what was happening with the murder case and there were so many characters that there actually has to be a character chart at the back of the book. I applaud someone wanting to take a large group of people and make them suspects in a murder mystery, but there's no mystery if you can't figure out what is going on. I think the only thing I got out of this book was that I knew what the murder weapon was and how it was discovered. I read to the end and I know who is guilty, but I'm still not very sure how this all came to be, because of all of the extra reminiscing and irrelevant jumble that were the beefy portions of the book. If all of the unnecessary chatter was edited from the story, I would have to say this would be a very short book indeed, but might be a good mystery.
    • 2/5
      I found this far too long. Too much unnecessary chatter that didn't add anything meaningful to the story.
    • 3/5
      I like Scandinavian crime novels. The setting and the writing style enhance the genre, and the books that get translated into English are usually good. Of course, now so much is being published that I've also come across a few written and plotted just as sloppily as the worst mass market fiction produced here. This is the first installment in a Finnish series by Leena Lehtolainen. In it, Maria Kallio is a reluctant homicide detective, having switched to policing partway through a law degree and contemplating returning to it. She's put in charge of what looks to be a fairly simple case when her immediate boss is off work and not due to return soon. Some members of a student choir group went off to spend a weekend together at a summer house and in the morning one of their number is found dead at the edge of the water. Somewhat differently than the usual Scandinavian crime novel, My First Murder is set up like a classic British detective story with a clear group of suspects gathered together in one place. While they do all return to Helsinki, the suspect pool is finite and Kallio is left to discover who the murderer is almost entirely on her own, which of course she does. I'll confess right here that I find authors like [[Agatha Christie]] boring. I appreciate that they laid the building blocks for the modern crime novel, but I don't find the structure all that interesting. Lehtolainen does an adequate job and her protagonist is likable, if not always believable, but I doubt I'll read any more by her. Incidentally, this structure was used more successfully by another Scandinavian author, Anne Holt, in 1222.
    • 2/5
      First Line: Riki woke up to a vicious call of nature.It was supposed to be a fun weekend for the choir group at Tommi Peltonen's seaside Helsinki villa. Instead Tommi is found floating facedown in the water off the dock, a victim of what is soon determined to be murder. It is up to rookie detective Maria Kallio to focus on the choir members in an attempt to solve her very first murder case. It doesn't take long for her to realize that what on the surface appears to be a happy and close-knit group is really a collection of young people filled with bitterness, passion and jealousy. It will take a lot of digging for her to find the killer.As much as I wanted to like this book, I simply could not. Too many things just did not add up. First, a rookie cop is put in charge of the murder investigation into the death of the son of a high-profile family. Yes, all her superiors are on some sort of leave or vacation, but why should that let the police put someone in charge who isn't even sure she wants to be a detective? One of Kallio's supervisors is a well-known drunk who often takes personal days to sleep off his latest bender. The other has taken vacation simply because he's sick and tired of doing all the drunk's work. This does not inspire much faith in East Helsinki's police force.The pace of the book also drags quite a bit. There are several digressions while Kallio and the others are pulled away from the murder investigation to take care of other crimes. Although I know this happens in real life, these interruptions really impede the flow of the narrative-- to the point where I almost started shaking the book and telling the author to get a move on.Maria Kallio talks a lot in the book. Too much of it is about her indecision over whether or not she should commit to a career in law enforcement. (Many times it sounds as though she thinks law enforcement is beneath her.) Once again I nearly began speaking to the book to tell Maria that, if she's so undecided, maybe she should resign and let someone else take over the investigation. I never really got any glimpses into her thought processes or how she was trying to solve the murder. By book's end it appeared that she just talked to all the choir members until she fell into the solution. Maria was a character who did not hold my interest-- and neither did any of the others.All in all, I was very disappointed in this book. Even the Finnish setting was rather generic. Since it's the first book in a long-running series, I have to think that the books that follow show a great deal of improvement. However... I don't think I want to test this theory.