"The Healer" by Antti Tuomainen: narrated by Simon Shepherd: English translation Lola Rogers ; Random House Audiobooks 2013...available as a download from Audible.....
Soon it will be Christmas in Helsinki. Every day brings rain and it is cold. This is a world where the climate is changing, the Arctic melting, the waters rising. Those who can afford to are moving further north as the streets of the coastal towns flood. In turn, the homes that they leave are taken over by immigrants from even further south, those lands and cities already under water. Finnish social structure is crumbling. The police are underfunded and understaffed. Private security firms rule the streets....
Poet Tapani Lehtinen is worried about his journalist wife, Johanna. The last call he had from her was about her search for a serial killer who dubs himself "The Healer". She was setting out, with her paper's photographer, to some kind of meeting but Tapani has heard nothing since. Her phone is unanswered and this isn't like Johanna; Tapani and Johanna keep in touch all the time. But Tapani knows that the police will or can do very little. If anyone finds Johanna - it has to be him....
For lovers of Nordic Noir with roots in societal change this book takes that change into Tuomainen's brilliantly imagined flooded future. Not a story of the cataclysmic event but a crime story set in the steady decline and disintegration brought about by climate change. But this also a love story. A tale of the lengths that a man whose faith in his love for his wife - and in his wife's love for him - will go in order to find her again. And as Tapani uncovers more about the killer, and more about Johanna, the story becomes gripping, violent, suspenseful and ultimately moving.
You can read another review of the book over on the Euro Crime blog.
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