The Mine

Travel Guide

Northern Finland – Suomalahti

The site for Suomalahti where the mine is and the small villages dotted around are fictional and when you read the novel and what goes on there, it’s just as well. But their vague location makes their significance even greater and ever more chilling than they might have been. They are evoked as cold and calculating places where the snow covers your tracks the minute you leave them, where the weight of the snow will smother, shock and suffocate you. This is no picture postcard of a snowy Finnish scene.

The mysteries of the mine mean that a journalist with a wrecked home life and an absent father has had to venture north to find out if this could be the scoop he’s been looking for. But some stories end up eating the journalist as he finds out. The mine and those working there are not friendly, their chilling welcome even more frosty than the surrounding ice. Everything here is covered and hidden. “Nothing to see here” might well be written on the sign outside.

Helsinki

Helssinki shimmers like the icy cold landscape it is in this novel. The novel apart from the crime and the stalkers actually reads like a good guide to the city itself such as Kaskisaari the esclsuive island in the city and Mustikkamaa Island, the city’s parks and streets in and around the parliament. Residential areas are evoked and seem remote and clinical. Stairwells locked up, doors which dont’t open to strangers and one where you even need  a secret password. Several iconic buildings and streets are mentioned, evoked with clinical vocabulary and sharp short sentences giving the place a chill above the one it already has here.