Hermann Ångström, the Hämeenlinna humiliator, is gliding through the winter dark of Helsinki and subjecting his victims to a series of unbearable embarrassments. He leaves a young bride at the altar, disguises himself as a doctor and delivers false medical reports, sends a government official into a downward spiral of depression—it’s a veritable plague of shame. The next target is impossible to predict, and the methods are growing ever more devious. Who is Ångström, and what is his motive? The case is assigned to Commissioner Vehmas, a widower, a man who believes that the future is an illness and that police work is folk poetry. And though he’s seen it all, even Vehmas can’t seem to track down Ångström, until serendipity steps in. A blackly comic suspense story, Petri Tamminen’s Crime Novel is a delightfully melancholic parody from one of Finland’s greats.
