A body on the beach. A holiday town at its busiest. And a cargo ship that has no business being this far north.
Author: Petri Saari
Finnish original: On hiekka polttavaa
Publisher: Gummerus 2026
Genre: crime fiction
Number of pages: 427 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original, English sample, English synopsis
Midsummer at Kalajoki, Finland’s great sand-dune resort on the Gulf of Bothnia: kilometres of white beach, caravan parks filling up, the light never quite going out. Then a drowned fisherman washes ashore – and the wound in his side was not made by the sea.
The man who finds him is Mikko Lehto, a salesman who has come back to a summer he doesn’t know what to do with. His marriage is over. The bad stretches come and go. What he has, and would rather not have, is an unnerving ability to read people which is why Detective Sergeant Kaisa Rantala, his friend since childhood, has quietly been using him on cases for years. The arrangement has always been irregular, and this summer it turns dangerous.
What looks like a local killing does not stay local. The dead man’s last weeks lead Kaisa and Mikko toward a smuggling route running through the harbour, a foreign freighter with a dubious origin, and a network whose reach extends far beyond a Finnish beach town. Somewhere behind it is a patient, methodical man who has been arranging the pieces since childhood and who thinks several moves ahead of everyone hunting him.
Petri Saari’s debut is Nordic crime in an unexpected key: a sunlit holiday setting rather than a frozen one, a prickly lead pairing and a convincing, deeply drawn cast – set against an escalation that gets darker with every chapter.
“An exceptionally assured debut. A skilfully built plot, a convincing setting, and characters whose morality is as fine-grained as Kalajoki’s sand make this summer crime reading at its best.”– KALEVA newspaper
About the author:
Petri Saari