Minna Lindgren - Death at Sunset Grove

 

Title: Death in Sunset Grove

Author: Minna Lindgren

Book: The Lavender Ladies Detective-Agency #1

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Year: 2016

Pages: 348

IBSN-13: 978-1-4472-8932-6

Price: 12.89€ (paperback, Amazon)

Mark: 9/10

 

SYNOPSIS

Good derectives come in all manner of guises... Meet Siiri and Irma, best friends and the queen bees of Sunset Grove, a retirement community for those still young at heart. With a combined age of nearly 180, Siiri and Irma are still just as inquisitive and witty as when they first met decades ago. But when their comfortable world is upturned by a suspicious death at Sunset Grove, Siiri and Irma are shocked into doing something about it. Determined to find out exactly what happened and why, they begin their own private investigations and form The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency. The trouble is, beneath Sunset Grove's calm facade, there is more going on than meets the eye, and Siiri and Irma soon discover far more than they bargained for...

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

Well, I didn’t know about Minna Lindgren or The Lavender Ladies Detective-Agency until I was looking for a book written by a Finnish writer in Helsinki. This is the first book of a trilogy but I first bought and read the second book! (Escape from Sunset Grove). I went into the bookshop decided to buy a book by Arto Paasilina in English but apparently his books are not translated into English (what a pity!), so I asked the bookseller about another famous Finnish writer and she told me that this collection was written by a Finn and it was a best-seller. Besides, it was the only one left on the bookshop, it was screaming “buy me!” So I did.

Minna Lindgren is a Finnish writer and journalist famous for writing crime stories. She also has written works on classical music, but her most famous work is the trilogy of The Lavender Ladies Detective-Agency (Death in Sunset Grove, Escape from Sunset Grove and The End of Sunset Grove).

As a person who has been living in Finland and has travelled a lot to Helsinki, I knew almost every street, park, shop… that she mentions in the book, so it was quite easy for me to immerse in this world. Also, Fins have a special character, and if you don’t know them, it is hard to comprehend how they act or think. I know that for somebody who is not acquaintance with Fins and Finland would find hard to understand them. Of course, that does not mean that you would not enjoy the book as the unforeseen incidents that happen are enjoyable and funny to anybody!

This is quite a Scandinavian crime novel as the story timeline follows a series of mysteries and its resolutions. Besides, it is also humorous, (Finnish humour), a sort of dark humour, that just they and people who know the Finnish culture can truly grasp -that does not mean that you cannot enjoy the book-.

I truly loved the book! I enjoyed it more than the second book (in case I did not mention it before, I read the second book first haha), maybe it is because there were some things that I could not understand, and now that I have read the first book I fully understand. When I read this book, I understand Why they call Siiri the “Finnish Miss Marple”, as she is a kind of detective. The funniest part of the book is, for me, when they find out that they assisted to the wrong funeral. Although it is sold as a whodunit, the social criticism about how the elders are treated is there, and it is maybe the most important reading of the book.