A teenage girl and a middle-aged woman have both been brutally murdered at a girls’ orphanage north of Stockholm. The clues point to the culprit being another girl, who has already escaped, making off in a stolen car, with a little boy strapped into the back seat. So the case for Detective Inspector Joona Linna becomes an abduction, as well as a double murder.
Several hundred miles away, another young woman — who scrapes a living duping gullible folk into believing she’s a clairvoyant, claims to be in contact with the dead girl. The Finnish detective is struck by how much she seems to know,and in such striking detail, even though he knows she usually fakes it.
This is the third outing for Linna, who’s nothing like as boozy or melancholic as your average Scanda-sleuth, but he does have his fair share of problems, including being under an internal investigation.
The Fire Witness is intelligently plotted and much better written than most thrillers in this genre. It rattles along at a terrific pace for 500 pages, never letting up for a moment.
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