Why a Booktrail?
A dystopian detective story, set in Helsinki destroyed by climate change and a whole lot more.
The Healer
What you need to know before your trail
Helsinki is in the thrust of a weather battle – this is a dystopian landscape where water is overtaking everything in its path, the social order is crumbling and where chaos reigns. Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is just one of the few still willing to live in the city.
But when his wife goes missing, he wishes he had maybe moved away. Instead he has to go on a desperate search for her and is scared to realise that her going missing might be linked to a story she was researching about a serial killer known as ‘The Healer’.
Tapani’s search leads him to some very, very dark places he may wish he had never witnessed.
Travel Guide
Yellow -black flames from a wrecked truck lashed the pillars of the pedestrian bridge at the Sornainen shore road.
So opens the novel and our introduction to a dystopian setting where the rain is persistent and dangerous where the world, where Helsinki is gradually being weakened and destroyed by nature’s strongest forces.
It’s a post war setting of sorts where water and weather is taking over everything. The plague and other diseases are rampant and the city is effectively dying a little each day
Imagine this and then imagine realising that not only is your wife missing but that she might know more than she is letting on about the serial killer she was investigating. The isolation of apocalyptic Helsinki takes this thought on its head and spins it around and around with force. Helsinki is a reflection of the whole state of affairs –
“Bangladesh, sinking into the sea, had erupted in a plague that threatened to spread to the rest of Asia..”
How do you even attempt to escape this horror when trying to track down your wife and then what?
Where do you end up? With an North AFrican taxi driver who helps you to search in places you didn’t know existed?
What do you really know in a dystopian world?
“I thought about how it’s not the things that are new to us that surprise us, it’s the things we think we know, and find out we don’t.”
Great to see such iconic places and buildings destroyed and changed but luckily only via the novel!
Where Next?
