My First Murder

Maria Kallio is a twenty-three-year-old law student working a temporary position at the Helsinki police department. She is sharp and stubborn, but her colleagues are skeptical of her abilities. When a young man named Tommi Peltonen is found dead at the water's edge of his family's summer villa, Maria is given the case and a chance to show what she can do.

Tommi had gathered his choir group for a weekend at the villa. On the surface, the group appeared close, but old resentments and rivalries ran through it. As Maria interviews each member, she finds that several of them had reason to want Tommi gone. His own history turns out to be less clean than it first appeared, and the list of plausible suspects keeps growing rather than narrowing.

This is the first novel in Leena Lehtolainen's Nordic crime series centered on Detective Maria Kallio, set against the particular social textures of Finnish life. The story takes place largely within the confined world of the villa and the choir, where class, ambition, and personal grievances overlap in a small group of people who all know one another well.