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From the Archives: The Girl with the Finnish Stalker

In this Summer of Stieg Larsson, we challenge Sweden's claim to the Nordic crime crown with a chilling Finnish story from our issue of June 2007.  In this extract from one of Matti Yrjänä Joensuu's Detective Harjunpää novels, a criminal with the deceptively mild name of  “Tweety” lurks outside a nightclub to seek, find, stalk, and close in on his prey, a drunken couple woozily heading home. Joensuu is an investigator on the Helsinki police force, and the reader suspects that he writes from experience about everything here, from the murderer's fevered thoughts to his simple method of keeping security doors safely unlocked for his return. The novel was published last year in the UK by Arcadia as To Steal Her Love; the US edition, perhaps released in hopes of catching the Larsson wave, debuts September 1.  Unlike Larsson's, Joensuu's ouevre is far from exhausted: only three of Joensuu's ten books have been translated into English. 

English

In this Summer of Stieg Larsson, we challenge Sweden's claim to the Nordic crime crown with a chilling Finnish story from our issue of June 2007.  In this extract from one of Matti Yrjänä Joensuu's Detective Harjunpää novels, a criminal with the deceptively mild name of  “Tweety” lurks outside a nightclub to seek, find, stalk, and close in on his prey, a drunken couple woozily heading home. Joensuu is an investigator on the Helsinki police force, and the reader suspects that he writes from experience about everything here, from the murderer's fevered thoughts to his simple method of keeping security doors safely unlocked for his return. The novel was published last year in the UK by Arcadia as To Steal Her Love; the US edition, perhaps released in hopes of catching the Larsson wave, debuts September 1.  Unlike Larsson's, Joensuu's ouevre is far from exhausted: only three of Joensuu's ten books have been translated into English. 

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