The Fresh Cut

Antti Tuomainen describes this book on the Gumshoe 22.22 author Q&A: "A sawmill operator in southeastern Finland gets entangled with the local gangster and the gangster’s supposedly murdered wife and finds love after a difficult period in life. It’s really a Finnish Midsummer Night’s romance with a few murders thrown in. And some lumber."

Heikki Nevalainen is the proud owner of a once successful sawmill, a mountain of debt and very few options to deal with either of them. An unexpected solution arrives in the form of local gangster Ismo Sippo.

Dispose of Sippo’s dead wife, and the sawmill can keep running. Refuse, and Heikki loses everything. Horrified but desperate, Heikki agrees, loads Annaleena into his car and heads for the mill. But Annaleena proves to be not quite as dead as expected. As a Belgian buyer arrives to inspect the mill’s timber, Heikki scrambles to keep up appearances.

But the situation is splintering fast, and even his own workers seem to be hatching plans of their own… Deadlines loom, tempers fray and misunderstandings multiply, and as the interminable situation grows ever worse, Heikki discovers that keeping a sawmill running is hard enough without a half-dead body and potentially fatal complications…