Palm Beach Finland = Antti Tuomainen

 What do you get when you cross Carl Hiaasen with gloomy old Finland, land of a hell of a lot of water?  Come on, clue's in the title...   Yep, Palm Beach Finland.   It really is as simple as that,

The concept is brutally simple, but the execution is really good.   OK, it's not as funny as the Poet Laureate of Florida in his Nineties heyday, but it's a lot funnier than Hiaasen has been since the Millennium.   The plotting is involved but never ridiculously so, and the characters are all well-drawn and likeable.   Which, given that one of them is a Helsinki hitman, is no mean feat.

The set-up really is that everyone has a dream.   Jorma Lievo has a vision of (like it says in the title) Palm Beach, only in Finland.  The heat is less oppressive, there is no tide for surfing, but otherwise...   Jorma has built it, giving the chalets the names of characters from Miami Vice.   It will take off in time, especially if he can expand.  But expansion is blocked by a ramshackle property which Olivia Koski has just inherited.   Olivia has been away in the big city, with poor-quality men who have drained her financially and emotionally.   Her dream is to restore the family home, starting with the plumbing, which is going to be expensive.  Jorma Lievo, meanwhile, wants her out as cheaply as possible.   The cheapest possible method is to pay two deadbeats on his payroll, Chico and Robin, to conduct a campaign of low-key nuisance.   They start by heaving a brick through Olivia's window.   The brick hits a burglar who comes at the pair with an electric blender.   Struggling, they accidentally break his neck.   The local police get nowhere with their investigation, so Helsinki sends in undercover Jan Nyman.   Meanwhile the hitman, Holma, receives bad news: his half-brother, the sibling he didn't know he had until recently, has been inexplicably murdered in a place inexplicably called Palm Beach Finland.   OK, Antero was a nut-job and a nuisance, but blood is blood...

I enjoyed Palm Beach Finland thoroughly and will happily read anything else by Tuomainen that I come across.   It's not life-changing, nor does it pretend to be.   Honest entertainment, deftly done.