Book Review: Ghost Island by Max Seeck

Helsinki Police Violent Crimes Unit Detective Jessica Niemi is feeling more out of sorts than usual. Since the death of her mentor, she’s started to feel less in control of the schizophrenic hallucinations that have been her subconscious mind’s way of signaling that she’s overlooked something: a disconcerting if surprisingly helpful trait in an investigator. She’s finally in regular contact with a therapist, who’s been prescribing medications, but her mind and body both feel disoriented enough that even her boss Hellu Lappi has noticed:

“When we last talked about this, in December, I asked if you had difficulty distinguishing what’s real from what isn’t.”

 

“And I answered that I don’t.”

 

“But you have these–”

 

“Hallucinations? Visions? Sometimes.” Jessica says, despite knowing things were clearly better a couple months ago than they are now. Something truly has changed. It’s been a long time since she’s seen her dead mother, who has followed Jessica her entire life. But something else has appeared in her place. The craziness–that’s what Jessica herself calls it–has, unexpectedly and for the first time, arrived in completely uncontrollable form. This is exactly what Jessica has always feared most: that the delusions would become unpredictable; that they would turn against her, pull out the foundations of her entire world.

So when a man accosts her after one of her therapy sessions and she loses her temper, with the subsequent violent altercation filmed by a bystander, she doesn’t protest too much when Hellu strongly recommends that Jessica take a vacation. Between that and an awkward confrontation with her best friend and co-worker Yusuf Pepple, Jessica decides to take off for a remote island off the Finnish coast where she’ll hopefully be far enough away from any trouble, public or otherwise.

At first, a month’s stay at the bucolic boarding house on the island of Smorregard seems like the perfect cure for her nerves. But the arrival of an elderly trio known locally as the Birds of Spring changes everything.

Decades ago, the Birds of Spring had been part of a contingent of children housed in an orphanage on the other side of the small island. Having been relocated for their own safety to Sweden during the Second World War, they were sent back to Finland after the cessation of hostilities. Unfortunately, the ship their parents were traveling on was wrecked in a violent storm. Newly orphaned, they were kept on Smorregard till other arrangements could be made for their care.

Once older, the surviving orphans would meet annually on Smorregard to commemorate their past. By 2020, their number had dwindled to only three, none of whom seemed particularly thrilled to have other visitors at the boarding house when they arrived. Jessica is happy enough to leave them alone to their reminiscing until she wakes up one morning and learns that someone has been murdered.

Ordinarily, Jessica would try her best to leave the detecting to the local authorities. But she’s started having visions of a young girl in a blue coat, a figure remarkably similar to one in an old ghost story that originates from the time when the Birds of Spring first came to the island. Maija had been a strange child who disappeared from their orphanage one evening. Her ghost is said to haunt the dock and lure the guilty to their dooms. Is that what happened again with this latest death, or is something far more mortal and sinister afoot?

Jessica is uniquely equipped to uncover the truth, and it’s a delight to see her back in the investigative spotlight after she took something of a backseat in the prior novel in this series, The Last Grudge. The twists in her personal life are also huge and will likely delight more series fans than just me.

But the real emotional heart of this novel is the young girl labeled both crazy and unloveable (a trait that unsurprisingly draws Jessica to her story) whose pain serves as the catalyst for a terrible series of murders. Maija is shy and self-conscious but also knows that she was once deeply loved:

So much emotion fits on the yellowed sheets. Her father sent the first [letters] from Kakskerta, but later he wrote from the army and the front. Some include the place next to her father’s signature; others read Somewhere in the world. The letters are saturated with love, sweat, and tears. Sometimes her father’s hand is steady, but Maija thinks she can also spot the moments when her father was scared; her father never mentioned his fear to Maija, not a single time. His fear that they might never see each other again. But after reading the letters over and over, Maija understands her father wanted to protect her from the horrific truth.

A moving meditation on parental love and the use of philosophy in dealing with pain, Ghost Island is another terrific installment in the Jessica Niemi series. I can’t wait to read the next one, not only because of where it might take our heroine moving forward but also because these novels are some of the best examples of Scandinoir out on the market today.